About ten years ago I acquired a very unusual upright English player
that needed a tremendous amount of work.  Eventually I got rid of the
instrument, it was too far gone for my budget.  (I finally gave it to a
local charity to auction off, so I don't know what ever became of it).
It had some very interesting design features, though, and I have never
run across anyone who has seen anything like it.  Perhaps some of our
UK members can shed some light on this unusual instrument.

The name of the fallboard was "Broadwood White & Co.", and it had a
"Malcom Metal" player action.  Someone once told me that White & Co.
was Broadwood's major sales agent in London.  There was no name on the
plate, but there was a decal on the soundboard that looked just like
the fallboard decal.

The piano was very technician-friendly.  The stack was suspended by a
rod across the top of the piano, and held in place by removable pins.
After removing these pins, you could pull on a handle, and the whole
upper portion of the player action would swing out and sit upside-down
on top of the piano.  All the tracker bar and control tubing was lead,
and appeared to be in good shape.

Other than the swing-out feature, there was nothing particularly
unusual about the design of the upper player action.  Down below, the
entire exhauster and reservoir assembly was held in place by a hinged
block of wood, and were easily removed as a unit: just move the block
of wood out of the way, and everything lifted right out.

The piano action itself was a bit odd, too.  There were only two action
brackets, one at each end, and made of wood. The only metal in the
piano action was the screws, center pins and springs.  The hammers had
rather thick cores, and one layer of felt, not two.  It was an other-
wise typical Schwander action.  Given the technician-friendly design,
I was surprised to find that the capstans at the backs of the keysticks
were simply flathead screws under a piece of felt.  This meant you had
to take the keysticks out to adjust the screws.

I have often wondered if this player action design had problems with
leakage where the various removable parts connected, in particular in
the upper action.  A little card found inside the piano advised tech-
nicians to apply liberal amounts of Vaseline to these connections, I'm
assuming this was to take care of any leakage.

I had originally planned on having it restored, but the more I looked
at it, the more I found that would have been very expensive to fix.
The ribs had separated almost universally from the soundboard, the
tuning pins were amazingly loose (as soon as you took your hand off
the tuning hammer, the pin returned to its original position on 90%
of the pins), and I suspect there were cracks in the pinblock as well.

But the scariest part was the case itself.  The sides of the case
didn't fit.  One technician friend commented that it had probably been
dropped.  The sides looked at the bottom as if the had been pulled
apart, although the bottom board didn't appear to be loose.  Also, one
side had a deep and nasty-looking crack dunning about a foot up from
the bottom

Some MMDer several months ago made a comment about odd pianos, some-
thing like, "The longer you're in the business, the more odd designs
you'll run across."

I always enjoy hearing about oddly designed pianos, so if any MMDers
have run across a similar piano (preferably not in as bad a shape as
this one), I'd really enjoy hearing from them.

Bryan Cather