I have bit my tongue long enough on this subject.  We all like you Andy,
but if you ask the hard questions, you sometimes get some hard answers.
I am not trying to step on anyone's toes by what follows.

All this work merging pianos is fine if you like, but what a waste.  I
consider this whole idea as wasteful laziness. I see absolutely no
reason for this sawing, notching and fitting parts from one piano to
another.  I consider it wasteful to have one working piano surrounded by
3 other pianos worth of spare parts.  There is nothing wrong with any of
these pianos that could not be restored away.  I am just finishing one
player that went through hurricane Andrew and 4.5 feet of water.  It
was a real job and I had to make replacement boards for the feeders and
reservoirs.  It is all original except for the wood that the bellows
cloth is glued to.  If you are changing parts from piano to piano to
avoid restoring, it is a waste of your time, because all you are doing
is putting off the inevitable, you might have 2-5 years left in this
action or that soundboard, but it all WILL have to be restored before
too long.

I challenge you to hone your restoration skills by reassembling all
those spare parts you now have into 4 fine sounding, playing pianos.  If
there is any part missing from one piano you can use the part from
another piano as pattern to make a replacement.  If you are skillful you
will be the only one that will notice that the part is not an original.
This would be far better than ending up with one playing piano and more
work for the garbage man.

There is no part missing from any piano that cannot be made including
the stack if necessary.

Take the idea to the extreme and the following is where you end up.
The champion of this idea of wastefulness is the House on the Rock
collection where you will find a hodge podge of miscellaneous parts
robbed out of Seeburgs, Coinolas, Wurlitzers and a myriad of others and
hooked up by the room full to play from some gerry rigged system. This
guy had no respect for the sanctity of "original."  I only wish I owned
the garbage dump where the parts went that did not end up in his rooms
full of mish mash musical melanges.  In this collection you would be
hard pressed to find a complete instrument of any kind without spare
parts thrown in to "improve" it.   I do not condone this method and am
probably a fanatic in the opposite direction, but I admit to my
fanaticism.  I have the mission to make ALL those player pianos like new
again, now if I could only clone myself.

D.L. Bullock   Piano World St. Louis