“The United States is the world’s largest consumer of grand pianos, buying about 40 percent of those made,” says Kirk Burgett, who purchased the company in 1996 with his brother, Gary. But now that the economy is improving, Americans, in particular, are most likely to make the investment. Mason & Hamlin produces three pianos each week, about half of its production rate before the recession. “The pounder beats the living daylights out of each instrument for about 10,000 blows in order to stabilize all the little parts.” Then, he says, mechanical tests are done and the piano is inspected before it’s shipped off to a dealer. “We have a piano in the pounder,” says Clark, chuckling. When we’re nearing the top floor, we hear what sounds like the soundtrack to a horror flick coming from behind closed doors: blaring scales repeated over and over at a maddening pace. Finally, a crew installs a gold-painted cast-iron plate that will bear the roughly 50,000 pounds of tension created when the piano is strung up, then fits the key frame into the instrument. At this point, the instrument is half complete. Next, workers use spinning cutters to shape the arms on either side of the keyboard before the outer rim is sanded, painted black, buffed, and glazed to a satin or mirror finish. “There’s no machine that can do this better than he can,” Clark says. Curls of wood come off his tool like butter. The piano’s strings will straddle the bridges, transmitting vibrations to the soundboard, which acts as a natural amplifier.Ī craftsman makes notches in the bridges with a chisel, each of which will cradle three piano strings. Next, the spruce soundboard, with its bass and treble bridges, is lowered and glued into the piano rim. Then the tension resonator-a steel-rod contraption-is fastened atop the braces to keep the rims from spreading apart when the piano strings are tightened. After about a month, the case is completely dry, and braces, or struts, are built inside the rim to give it support. Wet from the glue, the layers are bent into the piano’s recognizable “S” curve and held in place by the steel arms of a massive rim press. Above, electric rollers spread glue onto the wooden sheets, which are then laminated together to achieve the correct thickness for the piano case-up to 25 sheets, depending on the model. Like a light dusting of snow, sawdust covers the factory floor, making it incredibly slippery. On the day of our visit, we begin in the basement, where rough-dimensioned wood-primarily New England maple-is brought in from Tewksbury and cut to size. To learn about how these beautiful pianos are built, we asked Clark to take us on a factory tour. Today, 40-plus craftspeople in the factory and 10 more in other departments labor to create the instruments, which range from $50,000 to more than $100,000 and take about three months to construct. “The Falcone people cared passionately about good instruments, and Mason & Hamlin benefited greatly from that environment,” Clark says.
#Mason hamlin piano full#
The close quarters proved advantageous: By 2007, Mason & Hamlin had gone from manufacturing two piano models to a full product line of five grand pianos and one upright. In 1990, the company moved to Haverhill to share a six-story facility with the now-defunct piano maker Falcone. Several decades later, Bruce Clark joined Mason & Hamlin, but by that time, the engineer says, the quality of the pianos had begun to wane. Over the years, the business changed ownership several times, eventually moving to New York in the 1930s. In fact, several famous early-20th-century composers, including Sergei Rachmaninoff and Maurice Ravel, chose Mason & Hamlin pianos to make their recordings. Founded in 1854 by Henry Mason (son of the “father of American church music”) and Emmons Hamlin, a mechanic and inventor, the company, originally based in Boston, quickly became known for its innovative work.
0 kommentar(er)
