Jas. DeLucia Fine Reg
Written on the side of this key was the name of the person who did the fine regulation of this piano. James DeLucia did the fine regulation of this piano. (Jas. was a common abbreviation for James back then) Regulation is the adjustment of the action mechanism, which includes everything from the keys to the hammers and everything in between. There is a great movie on netflix called Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 that gets into how grand pianos are made today, which is the same as how they were made 100 years ago. It's not that technical but they really do show just how many people it takes to make a grand piano. Just clamping and gluing the thick plywood rim takes at least 10 people. There are tuners and finishers and stringers. There are people who fit the plate and people who cut the trees for the soundboards. Probably the most skilled position of them all is the person who does the regulation. This piano is a piece of history as much as it is a musical instrument.
Look at the picture above and imagine that mechanism applied 88 times, once for each key. There are a number of adjustments that can be made for each key to make sure it works correctly and feels the same as others. That process of adjustments is called regulation. It is a complicated mechanism, and I don't currently understand it entirely, but everything appears to be in good shape in my piano. My plan is to work on regulation before moving on to restringing or anything else major. There are some obvious problems right now, including keys that wobble side-to-side and hammers that miss some of the strings. A few keys are harder to push on than others and some just feel really off. It will take a while and there are a lot of strange tools I will need to get, but it is one of the first steps in rebuilding a piano.
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