The pinblock is a piece of laminated hard wood that receives the tuning pins, keeps the pins tight, but movable, and needs to withstand a total tension force of nearly 40,000 pounds. It is attached to the cast iron frame where the opposite end of the strings are attached. Therefore it is very important that the pinblock is fit properly to the plate to insure good tuning stability, and long term integrity of the pinblock. The plate is made of cast iron, which means there are irregularity's on its surface. So the pinblock must be hand fit to the flange of the plate. I also hand fit the pinblock to the web of the plate as this is often very irregular. This is a step that the majority of rebuilders ignore, but I feel is worth the extra time involve to insure the highest level of stability and integrity.
The first step is to mask off the plate web. This is necessary because I use black enamel to coat the surfaces of the web and flange, and do not want paint running through the tuning pin holes. After these surfaces are coated with a coat of paint, the rough cut pinblock is put in place and tapped . The result is black marks on the high spots of the pinblock. These high spots are sanded off, and the process is repeated.....maybe 30 times until the pinblock matches the plate to my satisfaction. The final step is to coat the face of the block with an auto body polyester filler, and clamp the pinblock to the plate under pressure. This makes a perfect match to all the irregularity's on the plate flange. This is only applied to the flange area. The end result is an assurance of longevity for the pinblock.
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