54 Rhodes housing and restoration - some final help needed

[karst]

hey all,

i lucked into a 54 Rhodes at a pretty good price a couple years back and spent part of the pandemic designing and building a new studio case for it and generally restoring the interior.






I've finished the case and done a ton of work to the interior:
- new hammer heads, all felt
- new damper arms and felt
- all new grommets, screws, & springs across the harp
- keyboard re-balanced & leveled
- everything tuned and tone/volume adjusted to taste

I love where I've gotten the tone of this thing, but I have a few small outstanding issues that maybe someone more experienced could help with.

1) my highest B has an issue where the tone sustain dies very quickly, but this problem goes away (the sustain returns) whenever I have a screw driver resting in either of the adjustment screws. I'm assuming this has to do with some issue with how the harp isn't holding those screws properly, which is why the mass of the screwdriver makes the difference, but I'm hoping there's a solution that doesn't include drilling out the harp. I have tried to put a variety of spring strengths underneath this tone bar and none seems to solve the issue.

2) A handful of keys remain down if I hit them with the pedal pressed. I'm still dialing in the height of the harp and so I imagine the related damper adjustments might change this aspect, but it's not immediately clear to me the difference in the key/damper relationship in keys that do or don't do this.

3) the top 5-ish notes seem to have a volume drop-off compared to the rest of the instrument. I'm assuming that maybe I should have set the relative volume starting from the top of the scale down, rather than starting at the bottom.

4) the highest note has a very weak tone and it appears that the hammer may not being striking the tine as directly as other notes. is the only solution here to bend the hammer head?

hopefully someone here has a sense of what might the best way to tackle these remaining issue. happy to answer any questions about the work I did so far.

[vortmaxx]

Hello, and welcome to the forum. That is some really nice wood-work you've done there. I love my 54. It is probably the last thing in the world I would ever sell.

I am not an expert, at anything, but perhaps I can offer you a few suggestions.

1) I had the same issue with a couple of tines when I first got my 54, and the screwdriver test was the same result. I ended up replacing one of the tines, and got away with using a tone-bar clip on the other. Have you tried swapping the B with one of its neighbors to see if the problem follows the tine?

2) Are the keys grouped together, in a certain range, or just randomly scattered about? Usually when I've had a problem like that it's because the damper bar was not aligned properly into one of its sockets.

3) If your pickups are adjusted properly and are as close as possible to the end of the tines, you may have a dead pickup in there, perhaps where the volume begins to drop off significantly. The 54 pickups were originally wired in series, and unless you modified that by adding jumpers to make it series-parallel (groups of three in parallel, wired to the next group in series) I think that if you have one bad pickup you can either lose the whole piano, or just the pickups following the bad one. I know that there has been some debate around here about this, but I don't recall what the final answer was. If you're handy with a multi-meter, I would definitely start by checking the resistance across those pickups.

4) I wouldn't try bending the hammer head as you would risk breaking it and then you would be sad. If the hammer is not hitting the tine properly, it could be a multitude of things. Perhaps you could post a short video, that would help to see what is going on there.

I will offer one more suggestion; I was able to do a lot of the work you have done when I first got my 54. But I took it to a proper tech to have it tuned and voiced, and to address a few duff notes. I don't remember what it cost, but I do remember that it didn't seem like much when I considered the fact that he was able to dial in my piano in a couple of hours, whereas I would have probably spent days if not weeks on it, and in the end it may or may not have come out sounding as good as it does now.

[karst]

1) I had the same issue with a couple of tines when I first got my 54, and the screwdriver test was the same result. I ended up replacing one of the tines, and got away with using a tone-bar clip on the other. Have you tried swapping the B with one of its neighbors to see if the problem follows the tine?

swapping is a good test I hadn't done before. swapped with the C above it and the problem moved with the tine, so that appears to be the culprit. i'm going to double check that there's not an issue with the link between the tine & the tonebar, but a tonebar clip hasn't really helped, so it might be that a new tine is in order.

2) Are the keys grouped together, in a certain range, or just randomly scattered about? Usually when I've had a problem like that it's because the damper bar was not aligned properly into one of its sockets.

I actually figured this one out. I slightly twisted the front pins on the keyboard to take side-to-side wiggle out of the keys, but a few of them were overadjusted and has humidity changes they started sticking without the pressure of the bridle strap pulling the hammer back down on to the key.

3) If your pickups are adjusted properly and are as close as possible to the end of the tines, you may have a dead pickup in there, perhaps where the volume begins to drop off significantly. The 54 pickups were originally wired in series, and unless you modified that by adding jumpers to make it series-parallel (groups of three in parallel, wired to the next group in series) I think that if you have one bad pickup you can either lose the whole piano, or just the pickups following the bad one. I know that there has been some debate around here about this, but I don't recall what the final answer was. If you're handy with a multi-meter, I would definitely start by checking the resistance across those pickups.

Yeah, the 54 has these all in soldered in series, so maybe one or more than one of them is dead. I'll get a multimeter and figure it out.

4) I wouldn't try bending the hammer head as you would risk breaking it and then you would be sad. If the hammer is not hitting the tine properly, it could be a multitude of things. Perhaps you could post a short video, that would help to see what is going on there.

I saw a vintage vibe video where someone used a heat gun to adjust the strike angle of the hammer (out of the piano, obviously). The hammer is hitting directly enough that I'm wondering if the issues might actually be the tine or something, not so much the hammer.

Thanks for the recommendations. I actually have a background is acoustic piano building, so I'm interested in taking on as much of the instrument's function as possible without resorting to hiring another technician, but obviously some stuff like the pickups being to touch on aspects I'm less familiar with. I'll follow-up here with my solutions, should they ever prove useful to someone else.