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The long harmonic bar of gun metal lies immediately above the agraffes, and crossing the wrest-plank in its entire width, serves to keep it, at the bearing line, in position. This construction is the farthest advance of the English pianoforte.
His little square, at first of nearly five octaves, with the "old man's head" to raise the hammer, and "mopstick" damper, was in great vogue, with but little alteration, for forty years; and that in spite of the manifest improvements of John Broadwood's wrest-plank and John Geib's "grasshopper."
This, a short bar of gun metal, was placed upon the wrest-plank immediately above the bearings of the treble, and consolidated the plank by screws tapped into it of alternate pressure and drawing power. In the original invention a third screw pressed upon the bridge. By this bar a very light, ringing treble tone was gained.
There are no steel arches as yet between the wrest-plank and the belly-rail in these German instruments. As to Stein's escapement, his hopper was fixed behind the key; the axis of the hammer rising on a principle which I think is older than Stein, but have not been able to trace to its source, and the position of his hammer is reversed.
The near ends are wound round the wrest-pins, which are inserted in the wooden bed, called the wrest-plank, the strength and efficiency of which are most important for the tone and durability of the instrument. It is composed of layers of wainscot oak and beech, the direction of the grain being alternately longitudinal and lateral.
The bars were strutted against a metal edging to the wrest-plank, while the ends were prolonged forward until they abutted against its solid mass on the key-board side of the tuning-pins. The space required for fixing them cramped the scale, while the strings were divided into separate batches between them.
The wrest-plank is bridged, and has its bearing like the soundboard; but the wrest-plank has no vibrations to transfer, and should, as far as possible, offer perfect insensibility to them.
Since 1862, the wooden wrest-plank has been covered with a plate of iron, the iron screw-pin plate bent at a right angle in front. The wrest-pins are screwed into this plate, and again in the wood below. The agraffes, which take the upward bearings of the strings, are firmly screwed into this plate.
The increased weight of stringing was met by steel arches placed at intervals between the wrest-plank and the belly-rail, but the belly-rail was still free from the thrust of the wooden bracing, the direction of which was confined to the sides of the case, as it had been in the harpsichord.
He ran a string-block round the case, entirely independent of the sound-board, and his wrest-plank, which also became a separate structure, removed from the sound-board by the gap for the hammers, was now a stout oaken plank which, to gain an upward bearing for the strings, he inverted, driving his wrest-pins through in the manner of a harp, and turning them in like fashion to the harp.
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