Bad sustain after replacing tine...

[Zaki]

An "F" tine (#57) broke off the other night. A am going to order a new tine and a couple of spares from Major Key, but for a start I thoughd I would just cut the tine from the lowest note to fit. However this is giving me a horrible sustain. Is that due to lower tines being made a little different (thicker? heavier?) or is rather due to me disassembly and assembly of the tone generator unit?

[DanTheMan]

Is the sustain too short? If so, you may have tightened it too far down with the phillips head screws that adjust escapement, and also, did you install the rubber grommets that go between the screws and the tone generator? And are your grommets in good condition? I don't have any experience with this personally, but these are just my sort of preliminary guesses. Basically, you want to make sure the tine/tone bar assembly isn't being "muffled" in any way or "choked" by being screwed down too far. Again, my guess.

[Zaki]

I managed to get rid of the sustain problem. I tried all sorts of things. I've fixed up grooves in my hammer tips, by cutting away some of the rubber, I've tried tightening the screw that mounts the tine to the tonebar, I've tried filing the end of the tine (read that jacked ends could cause bad sustain). In the end I tried adjusting the height of the entire tone generator a little down - that appeared to be the problem. Silly. I had several times tried to raise it a bit and afterwards I had adjusted it back to approxmiately the same position.

The top about 8 notes does not have 2 adjustment screws with springs, but just one screw and a rubber-feet.  It appears like most of the tone generators in this register needs to be loose in order to get high enough to get proper strike-line and pickup settings. I assume that the rubber feets have compressed by time. What are the names of these rubber-feets and can they be bought from for instance Major Key? I haven't seen them there.

[hrees]

The rubber feet are called standoffs. They were originally introduced to increase the sustain of the highest notes. They harden and compress over time leading to the problems you describe.

You can drill another hole and add springs and grommets like the rest of the piano. Butv standoffs can be restored to a degree. Try soaking them in wd-40 or something similar overnight. This will loosen them up a bit. In order to overcome the compression and get the correct alignment with the pickups you can glue a shim about 1-2mm high along the edge of the harp to raise the front ends of the standoffs. This gave me great results.

[jim]

i'm fascinated by these standoffs you speak of hrees.. is there more info out there? i've never come across them.

[hrees]

Standoffs are to be found on late mk2 (plastic keys) and mkV.They were intended to give longer sustain in the higher register by replacing the spring with a single piece of rubber with just one screw and grommet per note. They don't age well: every rhodes I've seen with them has poor tone and sustain in the last octave and is impossible to adjust to a get a good sound. I have managed to get them to work and they are reasonably effective, not really any different to a regrommeted older stage 73 with tonebar clips, though they are supposed to be best on the top notes of an 88. There is further info on the supersite in the technotes section.