Restoration of a Fischer Ampico for the Hicks family
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67) Felt bumpers are being glued inside the pneumatics.
This protects the pneumatic cloth from taking a hard crease during the clamping of
the pneumatics to the trunks. If this hard crease can be prevented the cloth will
last longer without developing pin holes at those points.
68) The three sides are glued up with new pneumatic cloth first and then set aside
to set up a while.
69) After the glue has set up a while, the cloth is trimmed on the first three sides
and the hinge sides glued down. The pneumatic must be closed before the the hinge is
glued down and then it must be kept closed until the hinge side glue can set up.
This prevents the pneumatic from becoming hinge bound.
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70) The finished pneumatics have now received construction
paper gaskets. The purpose of the gaskets is to make it easier for the next
rebuilder to get the pneumatics off without damaging the trunk or the pneumatic.
71) The pneumatics are glued back to the trunks in order using layout lines that
were marked onto the trunks before they were removed to begin with.
72) The three tiers have received newly covered pneumatics, new cork gaskets and new
rubber cloth leak guards on their ends. They are now reassembled and the lifters
glued back on and screwed down. The lifter fingers have also received a dose of
hinge lubricant since they were starting to show signs of becoming a little stiff. A
couple of bushings had to be replaced on the lifter assembly. The rest of the
bushings looked good enough to keep. Although, they will certainly need to be
replaced the next time the mechanism needs to be rebuilt.
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73) The primary chest is being tested. First all the
signal nipples are covered and high suction is applied to one side only. A test
gauge is placed on the opposite side, which has also been totally sealed off. If the
gauge shows any signs of suction that means the center divider is leaking. In this
case, no signs of suction were seen so the divider is working perfectly. Next, each
valve was tested one by one for air tightness and repetition. One valve failed the
air tightness test so the chest was opened up, a slight adjustment made to the valve's
travel and then the chest was retested and everything passed with flying colors.
74) Now the entire stack has been reassembled and the center divider test is being
applied to the entire stack. It would appear that there is the smallest leak
occurring in one of the factory dividers which really can't be accessed without splitting
the trunk boards apart. When one side of the stack is subjected to 35" of
suction (far higher than levels you'll be using in actual performance) a suction
reading of about 1/20" is readable on the "non-suction" side. This
amount of leakage is completely fine. It will not effect the expression levels in
the least. I would have preferred a 0" suction reading but the gauge did just
barely twitch when the opposite side was subjected to huge levels of suction. At
normal playing levels of suction, the "non-suction" side does not show any
leakage reading so it will work very well.
75) Another picture of the reassembled and restored stack.
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76) Another picture of the completed stack.
77) The stack with the last of the dust covers back in place.
78) The drawer, removed from the piano, before restoration began.
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79) The original lead tubing was no good any more. The
owner had temporarily repaired the damaged lead with plastic tubing inserts which were
epoxied into place. However, these inserts constricted the airways and would have
damaged the repetition along with causing numerous other problems. In this picture,
you see one of the cover boards still attached to the tracker bar and tubing stubs.
That was because the epoxy that was used to glue the tubing inserts into place had dripped
over everything causing this board to be glued to the assembly. It had to be
carefully pried off so as to not damage it. With a little care, it finally came
loose with no damage.
80) The drawer showing how the lead tubing had been cut to free up the tracker bar.
Later, the tubing would be cut away from the nipples at the other end as well as
you will see in the next few pictures.
81) The lead tubing was installed by Amphion with some sort of rock hard cement.
It is so hard that it took two days to remove all of it by chipping and scraping a
little at a time. Extreme care must be taken so as not to break any of the nipples
off the tracker bar. To make things even harder, the epoxy that was mentioned above
had run all over the cement. In fact, the epoxy was even harder to remove than the
cement was.
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82) The tracker bar is not totally cleaned up. The
outside facing surface has been carefully cleaned and polished to a high gloss. To
ensure no damage was done during the clean up of the cement, each nipple was tested to
make sure it was totally air tight still.
83) The nipples at the other end of the lead tubing runs have been removed from the
drawer and the slow process of removing the lead is under way in this picture.
84) All the lead has finally been removed and the drawer is now ready for the new
tubing. The choice, in this case, was to go with new neoprene tubing since that is
far less expensive than replacing with new lead.
© Copyright 2010 {David Rodgers' Piano Rebuilding}. All Rights Reserved.