Kawai VPC-1 any update on improved music stand?

Make your own, out of light chipboard. Give the base grip with say, rubber erasers.

I was so annoyed by the curved top, (which lived up to its promise by sending a speaker toppling onto another piano behind, smashing a key), I went and got a 3D printer, and will make flattening fitments, soon as I master the design process. Past a doubt there's one in your future too, so the chipboard phase is transitory.

Yes you can.

If the stand you mean is that boxed with the VPC1, taken as itself it's a rugged item, what're NOT are the pitiable plastic holders which affix stand to piano - which jut proud from the piano's rear begging to be cracked, by collision with door jambs, or by the direct unbalanced leverage of the stand's weight (likely), if not brought about by stand-collision with a wall (very likely).

Fix for those is to drill 2 holes into a length of wood, affix stand to that, lean against wall, probably as you envisage - and don't forget the rubber erasers for grip. It'll be a bit susceptible though, to punch-through of single-sheet music at the top (where there's a gap in the support).

And with a laptop leaned vertical against it, well, a first step is to secure laptop top to the stout wire, via some clip arrangement, and then secure that wooden base against moving, rubber grips no longer being security enough given the curved piano top. What a rotten design decision that was!

Piano arrived, you'll see, 2 small irregular 'chocks' can be designed which will join the down-projecting part of the T-section 'lintel' to the 'pitiable plastic holders' mentioned above, dowel-fashion. The objections to the 'holders' then won't arise, for they arose on account of the VPC1's wirestand projecting rearward of the piano, where with this contraption the weight-bearing parts are brought inboard of the piano's depth, and there supported by the piano-top. It'll succeed.

Makerbot,  the Replicator 2X model. And barely had I paid the Customs fee on the import, out came the much improved replacement model. Talk about cautionary experiences! That curved top completely distorted the wait-and-see approach I should have used.

I did buy the scanner, despite its shortcomings, intention being to revisit an earlier phase of mine that has left behind, for one example. a portrait of some workmate in fragile modeling clay, and similar, frozen at points where further effort risked damaging what was there already. No such risk now, with a 3D 'photocopier' in hand!

Even the shortcomings have their own payoffs, e.g., the lowered resolution of the copies (beginning with the scans themselves and following with the 'terracing' - usually smoothed by unpleasant acetone sessions - of the plastic printups) can contribute, if one continues forwarding a model by overpainting a printup in acrylic gesso, then filing down. Failures won't matter now.

The new printer models have just left the News phase, and a webinar 2 days ago says the middle model (~$US 3K), clearly the update to my 2X, was actually selling. Watch their product page, which probably needs updating, while meantime they travel on fullfilling their preorders queue - which with chagrin I couldn't join, a thousand curses.

They sure kept their development quiet, while actually SELLING me what they were replacing it with!

ADDED: here's a recording of the webinar (hope it works).

http://mfile.akamai.com/23543/mov/citri...9BD401.mov

Today I found an extension to Sketchup which'll equip it with Bezier splines, taking care of the curve to the top. Beziers use a 4-point 'convex hull' for their data, the endpoints laid ON the curve to be matched, can be daisychained, subdivided by a 0..1 parameter, so have advantages everywhere. The curve of the top can be vernier-measured as fallaways from a rule laid on the top's flat section, and the printups thus developed as an extrusion. Another extension to Sketchup will let it export STL files, which should be readily translatable into any format Makerbot uses. Too simple to sell, really. Now all needed is get enough Sketchup skills without having to sit through someone's idea of a course in it, and I'll have my fitments ready to print. Currently the printer's at my brother's address, but I just thought of the perfect place right here in my own crowded house. Excellent.

Kawai's let-off can come to niggle. As a *pure* simulation of a byproduct of Acoustic action, and nothing else, is it correctly placed, who says so, and why? And then, since the entire contraption is a rig of proxies for 'real' parts, doubts of one's instrument start spreading, as - do these keys adequately represent a grand's, for leverage? The answer's No for sake of less weight. Likely some such niggle came to bug sigasa, and he'd want not to have 'correct approximation' forever shoved under his nose, let the contraption be itself. (He's an inveterate tinkerer anyway, and with this mod, merely angled the sim-part out of the way, nothing like what he *can* come at. Mild. I see his bother vividly, sometimes, and one day who knows.)

As for the contraption in itself, it's the smoothest-running Kawai I've ever had. I'd prefer better repetition than it gives me, but that's partly my own deficiency and in any case is again the best Kawai I've had, at it. Ostinato repetition is a frill characterising display-writing anyway - and that mode's losing charm for me.

The most objective remark that's been made on VPC1 has got to be the Modartt engineers' correction curve for it. I'd sure like to know more about their measurement methods but haven't asked. On the face of it, it says that VPC1 delivers velocity more readily in the middle of the keyboard. INSERT: This is plain wrong, should read "delivers output velocity over-amply in the midrange of keystroke forces input", so the Modartt curve supplies the needed pullback to the midrange output.

And back to sigasa once more, his 3-point 2-range approximations to the Modartt correction point out a major miss-the-mark by Kawai in sticking with the Standard Midi File format. This was not just unadventurous, but sigasa's mf..pp range points out (more forcefully than does the Modartt curve it approximates to) the weakness of SMF for correction curves which properly WORK, and in the case of VPC1, right where that's most needed.

I had a more detailed discussion with sigasa about this, you probably saw.

Chris,

Thanks for the link.  This looks an excellent solution for me also.   Please tell me the height and width of the part holding the sheets. There are no dimensions on their webpage.

Ian

Thanks for the thought, I've pocketed your model, against the day I buy a new printer - gave the previous one to my brother.