Chapell Player Piano
By Larry Fisher
Hi all,
This player piano has been eating my lunch for years now. Not to mention the previous tech before me that gave up. (smart guy)
First off the customer really likes old stuff. Their house is furnished with really old furniture and I think even the wallpaper is some old stuff they found somewhere. The piano has no serial numbers anywhere, and the decal on the front is:
Autoleon
Triumph Auto
London
I guess they should have stuck with making sports cars.
Evidently I found the Chappel Player Piano Co. decal inside the piano somewhere, because that's the way it's listed in my file for this customer.
I replaced the pinblock in this thing twice. The first time I didn't get it right and so did it again, this time really using lots of glue, tight pinning, and real careful procedures. That part's holding so far.
The bellows take 15 seconds to "relax" and thats with everything in line except the pneumatic stack. The valves on this beauty were strange. The previous rebuilder replaced only the exhaust valves with home made foam rubber rings. That didn't last long. This first time I rebuilt the valves, I used the threaded valve stems over again and replaced the valve leathers with patent leather and replaced the exhaust ones with washer backed foam rubber. The pouches I simply replaced, I didn't coat them with anything. It didn't play very well, so I rebuilt the valves again, this time using new valve stems with the force fit collars, and tiny foam washers from PPC. I got all the valves to seal really well before I left the customer's home last time. One push of the pedal and all the valves were closed and sealed. According to the owners, that only lasted about two months. That was about two or three years ago. I just now found out about this today. Aside from the fact that any warranty on my work has long since expired, and aside from the fact that they really should have told me sooner about this, I'm faced with a job that didn't hold up, again ............. I repeat.......... AGAIN DAMN IT!
I'm really tempted to call Howes Piano in Denver and have them make me a pneumatic stack, retro fit it to this piano and be done with it. However, being that I'm such a nice guy, and don't give up very easily, I'm going to open this baby up and see if maybe I can see what happened here. I've sealed all the wood with shellac. All the gaskets have been replaced with suede leather. I have one cipher, but all the other notes seem to play, although weakly due to massive vaccuum loss. The pedals don't pump up rock hard even at a furious frenzied pace. The valves seats were sealed with PVCE glue and are made of metal. (typical Standard "toilet seat" looking seats) I don't know what else to share with you.
Any suggestions out there? I'm already married and don't need another obligation in my life. I need this monkey off my back really bad. Replies that start out with "You shoulda..." don't apply here. I need real solutions, not wasted bandwidth. (I should have my head examined.)
Lar
Larry Fisher RPT, Metro Portland, Oregon's
Factory Preferred Installer for MSR/PianoDisc Products
phone 360-256-2999 or email larryf@pacifier.com
http://pacifier.com/~larryf/homepage.html
Beau Dahnker pianos work best under water |
(Message sent Sun 26 May 1996, 05:52:31 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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