I fully agree that the best course of action is to rebuild the piano.
But I also learned the hard way that it is a very good idea to have
a qualified piano technician look over the piano before you buy it,
so that you have some idea what you are getting into.  Players came
in many levels of quality, from cheap junk to top of the line, and
one that was not too great when it was new can eat a lot of money, only
to come out not so great today.

You also want to look for serious damage that will be very costly
to repair.  I was offered one piano that looked great -- the player
action would have been fairly easy to rebuild, and the case looked nice
-- but my piano tech found that there was serious termite damage to
the bridges.  Fixing that would have been unrealistically expensive,
so I passed on the piano.

On the other hand some uprights are worth spending quite a bit on a
restoration.  I recently completed restoration of an Aeolian Themodist-
Metrostyle upright that had almost no felt left in it when I got it.
But my piano tech was very enthusiastic about the potential of the
piano, so we went ahead.  He said that that piano came as close as he
had ever come to building a piano from scratch, but the results were
quite spectacular.  This piano was done as a favor for a very close
friend -- he paid for the piano restoration, but my wife and I did not
charge for the player restoration, which was also a ground up rebuild.

The only sad thing is that the piano is now in Colorado, and as I live
in New York, I'll probably hear it very seldom if ever.  And now I want
the sister Aeolian sitting in my living room rebuilt, because somehow
it just doesn't sound as good as it used to...   :-(

Tom Dimock
Cornell University