Rodgers' Piano Restorations
The Best Piano Rebuilding in the Business
9091 Ox Bow Rd.   North East, PA 16428
Because  I have a great deal of work to do, I am forced to concentrate my efforts on all matters which concern the tasks before me.   Sadly, the telephone has become a constant source of interruptions to the work schedule which consist largely of people seeking free information and telemarketers.   I lose between one and two hours each day to these people when I answer the phone.   Because of this, I have been forced to shut off phone communication so that I can better serve my customers.  In addition, the email spammers have become so thick that I am getting thousands of spams per day.  They are so thick that even spam busting software cannot stop them.  The spam has flooded my email so badly that I can no longer gain access to my own email.  Even after trying a change to the email address, the spammers found us again in a very short time.  Each time I try to access my email I simply get "timed out" because of all the junk that is in the folder.   Although I would love to be able to communicate via email, I have been totally blocked from that venue by these parasites.  If you wish to communicate with me, the best method at this time is to send a letter to the address listed above.  I know this seems slow compared to other rebuilders, but it will be well worth the effort since the quality available here is of the highest order.

Third, we learn about the construction of the wind motor.

Follow this link to a digital photo of a wind motor that was just rebuilt at my shop.  As before, the shaded areas are under vacuum and the unshaded areas are under normal air pressure.

The purpose of the wind motor is to drive the paper roll across the tracker bar. (The tracker bar is a brass bar with a series of holes in it that connects, via tubing, to each valve's pouch as described before.)  The wind motor is usually made up of five or six pneumatics all glued to a common trunk board.  These pneumatics are "timed" in such a way so that they are consecutively opened and closed so that they will turn a crank shaft.  The crank shaft is then connected to a transmission which is connected to the spools that hold the paper.

The way this works is as follows:  The trunk which all the pneumatics are glued to has a long narrow chamber inside it which is always under suction.   This suction area has five or six holes in it that exit out of the front of the motor and correspond each to one of the pneumatics.  (See "Suction Supply" above.)  These "suction" holes are always covered by the slide valves so that the suction is never exposed to the "world."  Each pneumatic has an air channel that passes through the pneumatic and the trunk and IS exposed to the "world."

In this picture, you can see that the slide valve and pneumatic are both attached to a crank shaft.  The action of the pneumatics' opening and closing causes the crank shaft to turn.  When the pneumatic is in a position where it is time for it to start closing again the slide valve will also be in a position where the suction underneath it will be transmitted into the pneumatic.  (See above.)   Once the pneumatic is fully closed it will have turned the crank shaft far enough that the crank shaft will push the slide valve off of the channel that connects the wind motor to the outside air, allowing the pneumatic to open.  The slide valves are made in such a way that the suction underneath them is never allowed to pass anywhere except into the pneumatic.  The wind motor is "timed" by adjusting the length of the wire that connects the slide valve to the crank shaft.  The motor must be carefully timed or it will run uneven or not at all.