VV hammer flange breakages and other defects

[ideasculptor]

I've been playing my vintage vibe VV73 for a little over a year - I received it last October.  I've averaged probably one show per week in that time, so figure approximately 30 1-hour gigs and maybe another 30 2-2.5 hour gigs - and I play organ at least as much as I play EP, plus I put my wurly back into service for some of those shows after the VV case fell to pieces, so the numbers are actually less than that.

At a gig on Monday - the first time I've used it live in a couple of months, one of the keys ceased functioning and a quick disassembly during a break revealed the problem to be a broken hammer flange.  I just yanked the hammer in order to keep it from interfering with adjacent notes and buttoned the piano back up to finish the gig.  When I got up in the morning to see what was what, I discovered that both adjacent hammers had really obvious cracks in the flanges - running up from the screw holes.  One of them cracked all the way through and separated when I was unscrewing it and the other held together, but obviously for not much longer. 

I had called VV first thing in the morning and was told I needed to talk to Chris, who was unavailable.  I called back several more times over the course of the morning, but wasn't able to get ahold of him until almost noon, California time - a window of time during which Ken Rich not only took my call, but also had me drop by his shop, compare his hammer flanges to the VV ones to see if they would fit, and allow me to install replacements from his stock in order to avoid stealing parts from my own rhodes (and at a cost of $45 for 3 full hammer assemblies, of course). 

It was only 30 minutes after leaving Ken's workshop that Chris finally got back to me, only to be very defensive about how he has pianos on tour with pros which haven't manifested this problem - never mind that I highly doubt that any of his pro-tour pianos are used as the primary instrument on 50% or more of the pieces played during an extended jazz set.  He did 'volunteer' (I insisted) to replace the 3 flanges and provide a few spares, but I told him I wanted to inspect every single hammer, since the cracks I had seen so far had all started at the bottom of the flange and couldn't be seen without removal.  This evening I started that inspection and found that better than 50% of all the notes inspected - both black and white notes and both left and right hand notes - showed the same hairline cracks that had resulted in breakage.  This makes the piano utterly unusable live, since I never know when I'm going to lose more notes in the midst of a set.

It's entirely possible, even likely, that the cracks actually resulted from overtorquing the screws during assembly rather than as a result of playing, but the quality of the plastic they are made out of seems to me to be incredibly brittle for any application that will see repetitive motion and impacts like a hammer assembly does.  The plastic in Ken's hammers is denser - it doesn't feel as though it is more flexible, exactly, but that it is less brittle, and definitely more substantial. The VV hammers are lighter but reminiscent, to me, of the plastic that cheap model airplanes are constructed from.

I'm really unhappy with this development, as I have little doubt that an action that has been completely disassembled note by note can never be put back together to the same level of quality that it was originally assembled with.  When constructed initially, the hammers look to have been installed entirely before the dampers so dampers aren't being pushed out of place in order to access screws.  The damper attachments are coated in some kind of glue/sealant and the act of accessing the flange screw below the damper causes the damper to rotate, cracking that sealant, so it will never be the same without a complete disassembly/reassembly

[timpotent]

Although I never had any complains about VV, it seems that they always act a little cranky when it's about "aftersales"  :-)
I remember this story : http://repforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php?topic=18090.0

Hope it will work out well !

[ideasculptor]

The flanges are screwed into the damper rail with self-tapping wood screws (stainless steel, too, so you can't use a magnetic screwdriver to manipulate the damn screws).  My guess is that the rail is either not drilled at all or only has pilot holes drilled and that the screws are torqued in the first time with the flange in place via a power driver of some sort.  It would be terribly easy to overtorque pretty much every single screw that way, causing the cracking, since you'd need higher torque to tap the hole than is needed to just hold the screw in place.  It seems highly unlikely that this would be caused by playing, given the loose coupling between the hammer and the flange (and couple of plastic pins loosely fitting into 2 holes in the flange).  I just can't see significant forces being transferred through those pins to the flanges, so they must have been damaged during install.  In other words, poor craftsmanship/attention to detail.

[goldphinga]

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[Student Rhodes]

Sure, the hammers cracked, but they're blue.  Isn't that worth it?
I hope you get it worked out.
Best,
Ray

[goldphinga]

So the hammers are made of a lighter plastic presumably to save weight?

[ideasculptor]

I don't know.  I imagine that the VV pianos are built from the same parts they sell as replacements for Rhodes pianos, so I'm not sure if weight savings would have been the foremost goal. Additionally, if the cracks are a result of overtorquing during install, then it is entirely possible that the plastic is perfectly sufficient for the loads imposed by playing a piano constructed from the hammers - so long as it isn't assembled with them.  This could easily explain why they don't see failures when their hammers are installed in a rhodes (where the hole is already drilled and tapped).

[ideasculptor]

I just pulled an octave at random - C2-C3 and all but one of the flanges was cracked, several of them almost all the way through.

[mvanmanen]

Wow. This is a horrible story.
Workmanship and Customer service.

Hope you can get a positive solution.

Michael

[voltergeist]

Sounds like the manufacturing problem could be solved with either of more pliant plastic or proper tools and assembly procedures.

I would agree that there's no excuse for a $7000 hand-built instrument to be anything but near-flawless. 

[ideasculptor]

Got some resolution on this issue, today.  Note also that I removed most or all of my discussion of other perceived issues with the piano.   If I decide I want to discuss them publicly, they belong in their own thread since, for all my griping, I'm pretty fond of the piano so I don't want the discussion to turn into a VV dogpile or anything.

My eventual conclusion was that the cracks were the result of playing the piano, not assembly.  If the problem had been over-torquing during assembly, the cracks would likely have been radial around the screw hole, or at least varied in their angle across it.  Instead, every single flange that had a crack had a crack that was perfectly perpendicular to the hammer shank, and all started at the bottom of the flange and extended up - exactly what you'd get if the cracks were caused by upward forces on the front end of the flange.

VV are sending me a small stash of flanges to cover any breakages in the short term and they are waiting on a new production run that they claim will be of a more suitable material, at which time I'll get a full set of replacement flanges.  I don't know if that production run was already in the works or if my report caused them to do an inspection of other pianos and they confirmed a materials flaw.  Chris sounded genuinely defensive about not being aware of the problem last week, so my guess would be that they investigated and uncovered a flaw.  If most flanges don't crack all the way to the point of breakage, I can see where the problem wouldn't have been uncovered until now.  Even the occasional breakage might have been passed off as hard playing or a manufacturing fluke.  To be honest, I'd have made the same assumption had not Ken Rich suggested that I look at neighbouring flanges, which raised my suspicions and which I then confirmed by disassembling random octaves on the piano.  I'm still not best pleased about having to completely disassemble the action on my piano, I'll admit.

All things considered, small plastic parts like flanges and hammer shanks can probably be 3D printed pretty easily.  As a community, maybe we should build a database of models that can be used for printing - at least for emergency repairs.  I asked VV for models but they said they don't have them readily available.  No idea of the truth of that statement, but certainly wouldn't expect to impose on them to release their proprietary models, anyway.  It never hurts to ask, though.

[David Aubke]

Does a SketchUp file provide enough information for a 3D printer?
http://www.shadetreekeys.com/resources/models/

[ideasculptor]

yep.  Thanks.

[Student Rhodes]

That's nice that they're gonna send you new flanges. 
Certainly cheaper then them covering what I'd be asking for, namely to have them fix it as a warranty repair.  Wonder how many people may have the same issues with their piano and not know it.   Either way, if you're handy and have the time, which it seems you are, it's still a better option than shipping the piano.  Maybe you should request they cover tech costs.  I know when I worked at an amp repair shop so many years ago, that was standard procedure for a lot of warranty stuff.
Gary

[ideasculptor]

I would, but the only tech I'd go to is Ken Rich, who is often swamped with work and might not get to it for a time. Besides, this really is just a matter of unscrewing and re-screwing 73 separate flanges. Not exactly rocket surgery.  My bigger concern is just what impact a complete action disassembly will have on the action as a whole over the long term.  One of the primary reasons I paid so much for a piano was so that I didn't have to play on a rebuilt action which might suffer from inconsistencies and reliability problems - my vintage wurly has given me a fair bit of grief whenever I've used it for live shows regularly, so I'm not yet convinced that there isn't a lot of value in a new and reliable piano - assuming the VV piano is such a thing.

The things which factored into my decision to buy the VV piano, in order of importance, were pretty much as follows:

1. weight
2. consistency/quality of sound. (because I bought before I'd heard a properly restored/voiced rhodes.  I'd only heard crap)
3. newness/reliability
4. midi

If #3 goes away, then I have to acknowledge that I could have put midi into a vintage rhodes for much less cost and I effectively paid thousands to knock 50 pounds off the weight of my rig and get a sparkly paint job.  Ken Rich will swear up and down that one of his rebuilt rhodes will have a much nicer, more reliable action and, given the right piano going in (73-early75), will sound better than anything else. I don't doubt the second point, and his pianos do feel great in the shop, but there's still something to be said for not relying on 40 year old hardware when you don't have a piano tech and a spare piano available back stage.  Or, there would be if the VV hardware proves to be reliable, which is now in doubt.  Additionally, and this was really not at all part of my decision to purchase but is one of the reasons I enjoy the piano now, the sparkly purple paint job is pretty damn awesome.  It looks great and garners a ton of attention from the audience.  Pretty easy to paint a harp cover on a rhodes, admittedly, but I'd never have done so without the experience of playing my VV piano.

[Fred]

 As we have spent many years reverse engineering all components of our piano for use in it as well as support the players of vintage instruments, there are a few points I would like to make regarding the concerns of Vintage Vibe hammer flanges.

1.   Hammer flanges are installed to the action rail under specified torque.
2.   All holes of the action rails are pre-drilled on CNC machines.
3.   Our flanges are made of the same cycolac that was used in vintage instruments.
4.   Our flanges are made to the same tolerances of those found in vintage instruments.
5.   Any replacement part we supply will hold tolerance to the part it replaces (meaning there will be no adverse affect on the action).
We are, and always have been, looking for ways to improve the piano in all aspects. As of this date, this is an isolated incident... We have never encountered this level of breakage of any part in our piano. Because of ideasculptor's issue however, we have begun looking into alternate materials for the hammer flange.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and ask for ideasculptor's continued patience as an improvement upon the original design is realized.

Sincerely,

Fred DiLeone

[ideasculptor]

I beg to differ on one point - your parts may be made from cycolac, much like the original, but that material is available in a wide variety of grades and even a moment of tactile comparison between the VV flanges/hammers in my piano and rhodes originals makes it abundantly clear that they are not of the same grade of ABS. Throw 'em on a kitchen scale and I'm pretty sure the difference will be obvious when they also aren't the same weight.  It seems likely that getting the manufacturer to use a different grade of cycolac would alleviate the risk of breakage. The high gloss, transparency, and color are probably all working against durability of the part.  Rhodes originals have a matte finish, are completely opaque, and are an off-white colour, which may or may not be the natural colour of the resin, I don't know, but those differences mean that, by definition, your part is not made from the same material as original parts.

[Fred]

We have specified, and have been assured that the cycolac used is the same grade as the original spec. Our flanges are less brittle. I have heard of color influencing durability... Rhodes' original neoprene hammer tips come to mind.

This is the first time a fault in the flanges has been reported, and we do have a considerable number of pianos in everyday use on professional tours. Rest assured, we are looking into alternatives and you will be the first to receive a set.

Sincerely,

Fred

[ideasculptor]

I just discovered a small box with a couple of spare hammers, a bunch of tips, and a handful of flanges in my driveway - a nice little spare parts kit that would actually be pretty useful in a brand new piano, regardless.  The material of the hammers and flanges is already different from the material in the ones in my piano.  They are opaque instead of translucent and a different blue color.  I don't have a durometer handy, so I can't tell what other properties may be different.  I hope I'll have time to run to a friend's shop and test them this weekend, but I'm playing a gig on Sunday, so may not have time.  I'll get to it eventually, as I'm now curious as to what differences the color changes may incur.  It's a relief to have spare flanges, given what I know about the condition of those in my piano.  Finding 10 minutes to fix a breakage during a show isn't the end of the world, should it come to that, and sure beats trying to play around disabled notes.

[goldphinga]

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[pianotuner steveo]

You found them in your driveway? Did Santa drop them? Lol

[Ben Bove]

Glad to hear it was resolved.  I'd agree with Goldphinga - to look at the scope of Rhodes pianos production changes, it was mostly in regards to problems later discovered - tine breakage was high so a taper was later developed, teardrop felt hammer heads would develop a debilitating groove so neoprene tips were instituted, even up to the last iteration of the Mark V where hammer pivot pins were breaking with increased hammer throw - a change that would have been rectified if Rhodes production continued.

It's also great to hear that they're evolving and creating solutions continuously.

[David Aubke]

My old man always said "Never buy the first model year". He may have allowed an exception when there were there were no other models to choose from or when the model in question was particularly cool.

[Ben Bove]

Yeah I know what you're saying... the good part is the VVEP has a lot of history behind the engineering, and mine is particularly cool .

[voltergeist]

That's a good point, bjammerz.  Shoddy workmanship on a high-priced boutique instrument is hard to forgive, but latent design weaknesses are a fact of life.  It appears this falls in the latent design flaw category.   

My own experiences with VV have been very positive.

[ideasculptor]

With all new electric pianos, no matter what a manufacturer claims, they don't really know how pianos are going to stand up until they've been out in the field for a year or so of hard playing. So it's great that VV have jumped on this immediately and addressed the issue. Sounds like you play a lot and the original flanges were not really cutting it.

Of course, whenever I call them with a complaint, the first thing I hear is "we've got many pianos out on pro tours and they aren't seeing these problems."  So that's either a line of BS or I've got a lemon, because I really don't play that much.  I pretty much don't play it at home unless I'm adjusting my live rig in some way. I play it only at gigs, otherwise, so maybe 2-4 hours per week.  That should not qualify as playing it a lot.  If it were my living room piano, I'd play it that much daily. 

Today, an E-flat key cap broke off  and all I was doing was playing chromatic scales after messing with the voicing on a couple of keys.  I also had another flange break in half - which is what started the process.  The note was sounding funny and the hammer seemed to be double striking really often.  I started playing the note repeatedly and then it suddenly stopped working. I opened the piano up and, sure enough, broken flange.  Playing up the keyboard, I found another key exhibiting similar symptoms.  I checked that flange and it was cracked but not yet broken, so I replaced it, too.  Then I started playing the whole keyboard looking for anomalies, found a few notes that warranted minor voicing changes, so fixed those up.  After buttoning the piano up, I found a low e-flat that seemed to have damping issues.  I figured another broken flange, but it turned out that the key cap had come unglued and it was causing the key to play strangely (or else the keycap and the flange are broken.  Always a possibility). Keys made in China. 'Nuf said.



Not really a big deal.  A trip to the hardware store for some sandpaper, wood glue, and a clamp will fix it up before my gig tomorrow. But should I really be having to do that on a 1 year old piano? The acoustic piano in my living room hasn't needed a single repair in the several years I've owned it and I play the hell out of it. It was cheaper than the VVEP, too.  I've never had the key cap on a rhodes fail like that, either, and most of those are getting up on 40 years old now.  If I'd paid $3K for the thing, I probably wouldn't think twice about s**t like this.  But I paid more than twice that, dammit.

[ideasculptor]

You found them in your driveway? Did Santa drop them? Lol

No, the UPS guy.  You'd think he could get them onto my porch, at the very least.  It was blind luck that it was a garbage night so I walked out my front door to take the cans out. Had I left in my car, I'd have driven over the box without ever seeing it.

[pianotuner steveo]

Wood glue may not be the correct glue. The sharp is plastic, the key is wood. Contact cement (done properly) is likely a better choice.
CA glue is not a wise choice either.




Those damn UPS guys.....

[ideasculptor]

Honestly, I don't care.  I just need it to get me through my gig tomorrow and then VV can send me a new key.  The wood of the key is so soft that it was all but impossible to sand off the old adhesive and get a level surface.  It'll hold for one show, but it looks like ass.  I'm going to want a replacement.

[goldphinga]

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[pianotuner steveo]

Keep in mind that (most) sets of piano keys are cut like puzzle pieces from a slab of wood or laminated wood. A single replacement key may not fit perfectly in your key frame..... But it might....

[ideasculptor]

Keep in mind that (most) sets of piano keys are cut like puzzle pieces from a slab of wood or laminated wood. A single replacement key may not fit perfectly in your key frame..... But it might....

I kind of don't believe that. That would be a somewhat nonsensical way to go about mass producing a low cost piano in this day and age. Given that these are definitely made in China, I'd think computer-aided machining would guarantee you pretty much perfectly cut key components that can then just be assembled into keys by Chinese factory workers.  Store boxes of each key shape and build keyboards out of them at your leisure.  That's certainly how they ought to be constructing them, anyway, in order to keep costs low and quality and repairability high.  It's not like this is a craftsman-built Steinway with a $100K price tag.  I can definitely swap keys around within my current keyboard without any trouble.  I tried it.

[David Aubke]

I kind of don't believe that. That would be a somewhat nonsensical way to go about mass producing a low cost piano in this day and age. Given that these are definitely made in China, I'd think computer-aided machining would guarantee you pretty much perfectly cut key components that can then just be assembled into keys by Chinese factory workers.  Store boxes of each key shape and build keyboards out of them at your leisure.  That's certainly how they ought to be constructing them, anyway, in order to keep costs low and quality and repairability high.  It's not like this is a craftsman-built Steinway with a $100K price tag.  I can definitely swap keys around within my current keyboard without any trouble.  I tried it.

I don't know about the keys for the VV EP, but cutting keys from a single slab is indeed the way most keys are made.

[David Aubke]

I've never had trouble swapping keys around in a Rhodes. Sometimes a tiny bit of sanding is necessary to keep neighbors from rubbing.

[pianotuner steveo]

I said may not fit right. I did not say will not.

I have had trouble swapping keys in Wurlitzers more than once. The differences could be in the keys OR the key frames.

Low cost piano? I have seen many acoustic pianos that cost less than this keyboard with keys cut that way. How else would the angles be cut in keys that are angled left and right? They are cut from one slab of wood.

The Rhodes types may be an exception to this because the keys are straight cut. Wurlitzer keys are angled in most models.

[ideasculptor]

got a full set of flanges in the mail today - a good thing, since I lost another flange at a gig last night. 

It's strange that they all started dying right at the same time.  I used the piano for 1-2 gigs per week for the better part of 9 months, then took a couple months off when I played my wurly, and then when I put the VV back into rotation, I started seeing failures within a couple of weeks and have lost at least one flange pretty much every time I've played it since then, whether practicing at home or playing live.  It's almost as though not playing the piano for a few months caused the flanges to get brittle or something.  Or maybe the lower air temperatures we've been experiencing recently is the culprit - especially since I've played a couple of night time outdoor shows that have been quite chilly - in the 50s fahrenheit.  Perhaps the damage was mostly done during a single cooler weather outdoor performance and the rest has just been knock-on degradation from the initial cold weather cracking (cold being a relative term - this is SoCal, after all)?  This is pure guesswork, but it does seem like there must have been an instigating event, given the sudden onset of symptoms and consistent failures every since.  It's possible that they all just degraded from new at a very similar rate, but that seems less likely than some kind of instigating event.

My remaining concern is that if the original flanges were the weakest point in the action, and will all be replaced with stronger material, does that then leave the hammers themselves, made of the same material as the original flanges, to now be the weakest link and possibly start failing en-masse at some point in the near future?  I'll definitely inspect for cracks when swapping out flanges.

[ideasculptor]

Swapped the flanges out in totality today.  Took a lot longer than anticipated, but actually experienced less collateral damage than expected.  I figured I'd see at least a couple of broken hammers and such as a result of the process, but I just had one - the bridle strap separated and when I tried to remove it from the hammer, the hammer broke, instead.  Fortunately, VV sent me 2 spares a couple of weeks ago. Other than that, the only other mishap was the damper foam separating from one damper.  I haven't yet inspected all of the flanges to see what the final count for defects was, but I did keep them in separate bags, by octave, so that I know what went wrong and where - not that the fact that I play the middle octaves the most is going to be any kind of surprise.

I owe a huge thanks to Ken Rich for graciously allowing me to do the work in his shop so that I had access to his expertise (and glue) for fixing those minor issues as they occurred.  West coasters, you should do yourselves a favour and throw some business his way. You won't regret it.  Sure, he may charge a premium price, but you most definitely do get premium service, not to mention a wealth of experience with all things vintage keyboard.  Now, if I could just get him out to a gig - nudge, nudge, wink wink, Ken.  This is tomorrow, and we're playing 2 sets