High action leverage
Chickering pianos had excellently designed Erard and Brown style actions. Pianists often comment on how “they play themselves”, or “ played on this piano, these passages finally make sense”. We retain and restore the original geometries and thus their leverages. These actions have a higher leverage, relative to modern actions and thus a slightly reduced key dip relative to modern actions. The Chickering action’s tonal and tactile response is so intuitive and grateful to the fingers, that pianists acclimate to them very quickly; especially, as they discover all the things they can now do, that previously they either couldn’t do, or only could do with concentrated effort. A lot of words can be shed on this experience but you need to feel it to know why these Chickering piano actions are so easy to play and control.
Depending on the customer’s desires we will either retain the original parts and restore, replicate/manufacture shanks and flanges while restoring original whips, or replace shanks and whippens with new WNG parts. If we replace with new WNG parts, the original leverages will be retained, as the leverages relative to hammer weight are what make Chickering pianos so responsive and so intuitive to play. When replacing the action with a WNG action we always retain the original flared action. Designing a new action to retain this pre-modern flared configuration requires every bit of design chops we have, but it works. It affords a customer a vintage piano with the comfort of knowing any technician can service and repair the action using modern skill sets they use on more modern pianos.
On all pre-1900 Chickering pianos, we always replace the damper wire levers in the damper action with a modern Tokiwa part. This is because the original damping on these pianos tends to be “leaky”. The original screw in damper wires are frustrating and difficult for site techs to deal with. Our goal is to make sure these vintage pianos are serviceable by modern site techs while respecting and retaining all the really excellent original design intents.
