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The Music Trade Review
48
SEPTEMBER 25, 1926
The Technical and Supply Department—(Continued from page 47)
Every factory whose owners are interested in
improving the tonal and mechanical value of the
product, while at the same time attempting to
increase output and lower overhead, is in the
position of needing the services of the engineer.
It is to this last-named man that the task must
be assigned of studying thoroughly and deliber-
ately, without time limit or haste, the designs
upon which the product is being put out. From
a study of these designs will then proceed a
redrafting of them all, involving such correc-
tions and refinements as may appear to follow
from the facts in each case. When those im-
proved designs have been drafted it will be
necessary to discover just what patterns are
needed for case maker, foundry, bellyman, ac-
tion maker, string maker, action finisher, action
regulator, fly finisher, hammer maker, and so
on. And when the facts have been set forth, it
will next be requisite to design and construct
patterns of a permanent nature, which may con-
fidently be expected not to lose their due pro-
portions under usage. And lastly it will be
necessary to work the use of these patterns
gradually into each department. Only when this
has been thoroughly done and the foreman of
each department is ready to admit their
superiority over the older and less exact pat-
tern? can steps be taken to mechanize the de-
partments one by one and finally turn them
over to the tender mercies of more or less un-
skilled labor.
Sad, But True
A few words, as to the results likely to fol-
low upon investigation of existing designs and
patterns, will not be out of place. It should be
said, for it is true, that there is not a factory in
the industry to-day working faithfully to pat-
terns permanently constructed after perma-
nently worked out and preserved designs. So
long as one controlling mind can personally put
its skill upon each instrument that goes out,
working exactly to permanent patterns is not
necessary.
The very moment, however, that
output gets too large for the single supervising
mind to control the final appearance of each
piano that leaves the works there must come
about a greater or lesser state of confusion,
leading ultimately to something very like chaos.
As it is, I could name factories which are in
something very like this condition, factories
which have no fixed methods and no perma-
nent patterns. The bellyman sets his bridges
according to a pattern which, in a good many
cases, has nothing to do with the lengths of the
strings, and fits his plate also without regard to
the one vital point, which is these same lengths.
The millroom foreman has made his patterns for
sawing out the bridges, from the drawing of the
scale, but no one has checked him up. The
bellyman likewise has made his bridge-pin drill-
ing-jig from the same drawing, nor has any one
checked him up. Hence, constant variations of
"MARKDOWNS"
ARE UNNECESSARY
EALERS everywhere are finding it
D
easy to repair damage to varnished
surfaces—consequently making big sav-
ings through the elimination of the
necessity for mark-downs. Our little
booklet "How to Repair Damage to
Varnished Surfaces" tells how you, too,
can do this. A copy of this will be
sent to you free upon request.
The M.L.Campbell Co.
1OOS W. 8th St.
measurement, intensified by the fact that when-
ever a difficulty arises, either tonal or mechani-
cal, the foundry is called in to make a trifling
alteration in the casting pattern; this alteration
being dictated by the bellyman foreman. The
lack of a controlling head, thus painfully dis-
covered, acts with the same disastrous effect
throughout the entire factory.
It is hardly
astonishing that, in these circumstances, pianos
are turned out suffering from every kind of de-
fect and utterly lacking any standard of tonal
value to which each may be found to measure
up.
How to Obtain Exactness
And how then are correct designs to be ob-
tained, from which correct patterns in turn may
be constructed. Only in one way, and that is
by adapting the ascertained facts of musical
acoustics and the accepted methods of mechani-
cal engineering to the long experience and vast
practical knowledge accumulated in the shops
during a century of American piano making.
For many years the goal of every smaller maker
was the shop methods of the few great men, the
Theodore Steinways, the Ernest Knabes, the
Frank Chickerings, the John Hardmans, the
Hugo Sohmers. The methods of these men
were industriously copied, and everything which
could be appropriated from them was appro-
priated. Yet their imitators did not succeed in
duplicating their achievements, simply because
those imitators did not share that mental grasp
of the problems which the men themselves had
attained. It was once said of the president of a
famous small New England college that a log
with him at one end of it and a student at the
other would in itself constitute a University. It
might likewise be said that any of the men men-
tioned above could produce a fine piano with-
out any scales at all. On the other hand, draw-
ings and designs by these men, without their
own hands and brains, have been found useless
in the hands of others. Which is precisely why,
now that the old generation of individual crea-
tive artists is gone, scales and patterns must be
worked out to a degree of refinement such as
the piano business has never yet known. Only
then, only when from such designs and patterns
can be turned out which semi-skilled or ordinary
machine labor can use with a low error per-
centage, can the mechanization of the piano in-
dustry begin.
Nor need any one suppose that this will mean
the death of personal skill. The supervising
men, the tuners, toners, designers, expert in-
spectors, buyers of materials,, engineers and
foremen will be much more important than they
are now and much better rewarded. The piano
industry will be an industry of engineers and
tone artists controlling armies of workers by
exquisitely accurate patterns, with exquisite
skill, and producing pianos of tonal beauty such
as the world has not yet heard. This is the pos-
sible future of the piano industry.
" Correspondence
is solicited and should be addressed to William
Braid White, 5149 Agatite avenue, Chicago.
Exhibited in Columbus
CHICAGO, I I I . , September 20.—Charles Leiser,
Western traveling representative of the Pratt
Read Player Action Co., Deep River, Conn., ha?
returned to his Chicago headquarters, following
his trip to Columbus, O., on the occasion of tht
Ohio Music Merchants' Convention last week.
Mr. Leiser had charge of the display of the
Pratt Read Player Action Co. at the Neil House.
• The display showed the model P electric action
individually and also as installed in a Schaff
Bros, piano. Another Pratt Read player action
was shown installed in a P. C. Weaver piano.
William Fowler, proprietor of the Bungalow
Music Store, Taylorville, 111., has purchased the
stock and fixtures of the R. C. McCauley Music
Store, that city.
TUNERS
AND
REPAIRERS
Our new catalogue of piano and
Player H a r d w a r e , Felts and
Tools is now ready. If you
haven't received your copy
please let us know.
Kansas City, Mo.
FAUST SCHOOL
OF TUNING
Standard of America
Alumni of 2000
Piano Taniat. Pip* and Reed Organ
u d Plarw Pia»o. Tear Btoak ¥tt.
27-29 Gainsboro Street
BOSTON, MASS.
Hammacher, Schlemmer & Co.
New York, Since 1848
4th Ave. and 13th St.