Sometime around October 2022, I did some math and accepted the reality that as long as I wanted to live in a house versus my car, retiring was not going to happen in my lifetime. So with that in mind, I decided that I needed to gift myself a custom tuning hammer. I felt that the handle should be oblong instead of round, and that the round top end be sized specifically for my hand. After tormenting various custom hammer makers over this, it became clear that I was asking for something impossible. That led me to destroy one of my original hammers, extract the rod, and make a tuning hammer. It sucked, so I then convinced a machinist to help me design a rod insert that was less heavy and didn't flex. It was better but still didn't compare to other levers on the market. At this stage, my custom tuning hammer seemed like an impractical impossibility.

In the midst of this, I had lent my other hammer to musician Douglas Schmidt. Doug had recently decided to resume his tuning career after a 20-year hiatus. Doug found that the other tuning hammer handle caused him thumb pain. Being a bandoneon player, this was not a small concern. Liking the idea of also making himself a hammer, Doug enlisted the help of his friend, Ken Ward, a retired engineer, to come up with some ideas and create drawings for submitting to a machine shop. The initial attempt was not so good, but it led to more thoughts, more drawings, and more attempts, each an encouraging improvement. We eventually created a usable stainless steel prototype and enlisted some local techs to trial it. With their input and a couple more prototypes, a final design, which has exceeded all expectations, was drawn up in April 2024 by Brendan Melin from Access.

Along the way, numerous fellow piano technicians offered encouragement, advice, criticism, and insight. It would have never materialized without the hive mind.

-Deborah