Voicing 2

Once the back 8' seemed to playing reasonably well I turned my attention to the front 8'.

Zuckermann provide a wooden lever stop level which moves the register for the front 8' so that it can be turned on and off. There is, however, no provision for controlling the register for the back 8' and before voicing the back 8' I had carefully set it into the correct positions by inserting shims at either end of it.

This means that, in order to voice the front 8', you have to remove the jacks for the back 8' which is less than ideal for several reasons - it makes it difficult to find the right balance between the two voices and it leaves the strings for the back 8' completely undamped which means that when you play the front 8' you have to contend with the sound of sympathetic vibrations from the back 8'.

After a frustrating week of not making much progress I decided that, at the very least, I needed to be able to turn the back 8' on and off on a temporary basis while I was voicing the front 8'. Since the jacks for the back 8' pluck the strings on their left this means that the register needs to be moved slightly (somewhere between 1mm and 1.5mm) to the right in order to get it into the "off" position. Since there was already a shim of approximately the correct thickness at the right hand end of the register all that was necessary was to remove it. Unfortunately, however, the gap between the end of the registers and the case is hidden by the wooden plates on which the jack rail supports are mounted which makes it impossible to get at the shims without removing all of the jacks, removing the spine plug and removing the registers from the instrument.

Once I had the back 8' register set up so that it could be turned on and off and had made some progress with voicing the front 8' I decided that it would be worth making an additional stop lever for the back 8' and making it a permanent feature of the instrument.

Here is the original stop lever for the front 8':




I made a copy of it - slightly longer than the original because it has to reach the back register


and here it is fitted in place