Do-it-yourself Piano Repair
By Ed Gloeggler
There seems to have been more than the usual share of inquiries about "do it myself" piano rebuilding. I think an account of my experience in this area may shed some light on this topic.
As background, I'm the sort of guy who can fix anything. I've rebuilt automobile engines, repaired every sort of vending machine, constructed electric printed circuits, and built professional architectural models. I maintain several Mills Violanos for clients, and I even built a house or two, complete with plumbing and heating. Generally, if it breaks, and there's a book about it, I can fix it ... so I always thought.
So now I own a player piano, a Stroud Duo-Art that some craftsman rebuilt with white (!) glue. I went about reading all I could find about the player action and piano, and set to work undoing the damage. The whole mystery of piano tuning seemed fascinating, and the books in print about it seemed designed to confuse, so I sent for a $400 mail-order course.
Needless to say, you cannot learn to tune a piano by mail; yet you can derive some basic understanding that can help you maintain your equipment, at least to the point of getting it up to pitch.
The player action of the piano offered little challenge, short of removing the *&#!!$% white glue and making new wooden parts. The piano, on the other hand, ... ...
After one late night round with whippens and hammers, I explained to the dear Rosanne at morning coffee that _never in my entire life_ had any mechanical thing given me so much trouble. Pianos are made unlike anything else in the world. After all, there is no single other thing that you can possibly find that is crafted of thousands of wooden and felt parts held together with hide glue all in a manner that seems to make it impossible to access anything.
To this very day, I can't understand how these things are manufactured today in any sort of efficient manner. To top it all off, seemingly every moving thing has an adjustment. And most of the adjustments cannot be made until the action is removed. Do you get the picture?
Even something as simple as replacing a string really gave me a hard time. The string wants to whip around, quite uncooperative, while you attempt to kink it around the bottom and coil the top around the pin. You would not believe what grief a simple task like that can cause to a newcomer without the experience or tools.
To sum it up, I finally got the thing together, and I am truly grateful for not having done any damage to a nice instrument. The repairs were finished in a quality manner after some hundreds of hours. No, I never learned to tune pianos. I'll tune mine, but even that is a tiresome, extremely difficult job that I could never consider to be properly done.
In the Long Island, New York, area, the guys who mow lawns earn about $15 per hour. Piano technicians earn about $10 per hour. I came away from the entire adventure with a giant respect for a profession that is vastly underpaid and unappreciated. The problem here, of course, is finding a piano tech who is truly professional and won't botch up a job with white glue, strip screws, etc. To the guys reading this who make their living repairing pianos, I tip my hat; your skill is truly an art.
For the novice who wants to rebuild his own piano, I believe that with the right research, a steady hand and devotion to perfection, the job can be done. But a good professional will, without any doubt, do a better job at a _very_ reasonable hourly rate. If you decide to do it yourself, be prepared for a job that will have you shaking your head in disbelief of how difficult a seemingly simple device can be to repair.
Ed Gloeggler, Long Beach, NY
( Jody, feel free to edit my longwinded thoughts, to save them for another day, or simply to file them elsewhere.)
[ Nay, Ed, it's a _wonderful_ letter, with hope for the newcomers
[ and camaraderie for the "sadder but wiser". It all rings true!
[
[ Robbie
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(Message sent Mon 9 Dec 1996, 22:40:04 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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