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Topic: Max’s method to fix old and tight of the upright piano hammers  (Read 1921 times)

Offline themaximillyan

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“Max’s method to fix old and tight of the upright piano hammers - How to loosen the shank from the flange.”

Yesterday (03/21/24) on Reddit I was contacted by user u/m22active, who asked me for advice regarding the defective operation of 'the action' old piano .
( Hey man! I've got a problem with an old piano i picked up for free where the hammers don't return back to resting after striking the strings, do you think this is something you could help with by any chance? It would be very much appreciated.

From what i can tell it's either the jack spring is worn out or the pinning is too tight, i'm trying to DIY it because i don't have the money for a piano tech and this is a little restoration project, do you think thats something i could do myself or do you think it would be too complicated :/)

Several hammers of a Kirkman upright piano, after hitting the string, real slowly returned to 'the hammer rail' there. I advised using the “Max’s method to fix old and tight of the upright piano hammers - How to loosen the shank from the flange.” and successfully was carried it out there now.

In the video we can see that at the beginning (when the upright piano anybody is shown beiging played the piece) the hammers actually slowly return to 'the hammer rail' there. Then we can see bad work 'the hammer' (H5), which is slow come back to 'the hammer rail' there. After using 'Max's method to fix old and tight of the upright piano' hammers, the same hammer (H5) beigin works great only past there.
Do not be afraid of such situations associated with defective work of your ('the action') upright piano. Try to fix it yourself there.
"the one who walks will master the road"
Best regards, Max

Thank you, it’s a Kirkman upright piano from the 1940’s, when i first got it it hadn’t been tuned in over 20 years, half of the hammers were getting stuck by the strings and the piano was unplayable, the internals were covered in about 2cm of dust. Luckily, compressed air solved a few of my problems - by removing the actions and spraying the dust away a good amount of them started working again, what was left was about 10 hammers which would still not return, your method of holding the base and giving the hammer a wiggle worked perfectly, now they all fall back to the rail.
Sometimes we can observe that after the hammer of the upright piano strikes the string, it returns very slowly to a static position to the hammer rail there.
Why is this happening?
Most often this is due to very tight fitting 'the butt hole of hammer' to 'the hammer butt flange'. Perhaps this pin is too large in relation to 'the butt hole of hammer' too. Either 'the hammer butt' itself swells there. There is an increase in friction between the pin and the wooden place 'butt hammer hole' there. As a consequence, the defective kinematics of whole hammer there. What we can do?
The script to fix is:
1 Sometimes you can try to put a drop of denatured alcohol on the edges of both bushes (hammer flange). This can be done using a regular medical syringe there. Try make it without remove the hammer from upright piano action.
2 If after the injection of alcohol, the hammer still does not return well to 'the hammer rail', then you need to remove the hammer from the upright piano action.
3 "gently" you need to loosen the hammer in the flange. Max demonstrates this on video there.

With one (right hand) he tightly squeezes 'the hammer flange', with his left hand Max holds the hammer (in the place of the butt) and gently swing it from side to side.
It usually helps here.