I recently made a request looking for a pressure bar for a Virtuolo
player I am working on.  I am happy to say that one has been located,
sort of.  I went to a local piano rebuilder that scrapped many pianos
in the past.  He saved all the metal pieces including the screws.
I also needed some screws for the pressure bar, and he let me look
through the two five gallon buckets full of screws he had.

He had a stack of old rusted pressure bars (probably more than 50) to
look through.  With my template in hand, I was able to find only four
pressure bars that were close (17 holes).  As it turned out, the
Virtuolo bar is in two pieces because of one of the action bolts being
right in the center.  Either the original bar had a large hole in it
or it was two pieces.  I had to cut two bars in order to make them
work.  I used one bar for the left of the action bolt (about 2/3) and
the other for the right (remaining 1/3).

Fortunately, the guy that I am doing the piano for has a complete
welding and machine shop (doing stainless steel sink manufacturing).
I marked the holes that needed to be filled and re-marked the new
holes.  He had one of his employees drill and countersink the new holes
with a CNC mill.  The bar(s) turned out great, and you can't tell
where the old holes were.

Thanks to those that responded.  I now know that trying to find the
correct bar for this piano would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Rich Ingram
Southern California
rollguyrich@yahoo.com.geentroep [delete ".geentroep" to reply]