My name is Bob Hunt and I am a school teacher in Northern NH.  I have
always loved pianos and especially player pianos, buying my first one
as soon as I got my first teaching job.  It is a Newton with a General
Player Action.  At the time I was living in Vermont and a local guy had
done the restoration, it was his second.  Later I bought another, a
Story and Clark and much bigger and heavier then the Newton, unrestored
and never quite got around to doing anything with it and after getting
married and having a couple of kids my wife said it had to go,
particularly as we were moving into a very small antique cape - I got
rid of one piano and a couple of pump organs as well as a few
Victorlas.

When we left Vermont for NH I  had to refinish the piano as
it was going to have to go in the living room, the finish was all
sticky in summer - you could scrape it off with your fingernails.  I
had very good luck with a ten dollar gallon of Denatured alcohol and
discovered that under the black goo was nice red mahogany, some solid
and some veneer.

Two summers ago a friend was given a beautiful player
that had spend most of its life unused in the Masonic Temple.  Since no
one locally knew anything about it I was asked to look at it.  It was
in remarkable condition, the hoses and the tracker bar tubes had
deteriorated but the pneumatics and bellows were pretty good
considering the amount of time it had sat.  I retubed the tracker bar,
it is a transposing tracker bar and someone had tried to shift it and
broke all the tubes, looked like broken spaghetti.  To my great
surprise the thing played well after retubing and after tuning was
placed in the new owner's flower shop on Main Street of Lancaster NH,
where browsers are welcome to stop for a tune.  It has been working
well ever since.

This week a parent of one of my students offered me a piano.  I have no
room at home, but got permission to have it at school.  It is a
Gulbransen, unrestored, circa 1925, the price tag on the back, the
present owner's Grandmother got it as a tenth birthday present.  It is
the cheapest model, the "Community", and it appears it hasn't been tuned
in at least fifty years!!  I am hoping it is not one of the glued
together stack models, and since it is an 80 note player, with a card
taped to the stack saying the last four notes at either end do not
function so all rolls can be played, I  think it might have a screwed
together stack, haven't really looked that far.

It has the fishing pole (?) tracking mechanism I think, not being at
all familiar with it, a tack rail, and a strange melody pointer that
swings down in front of the roll, I was stumped at this until reading
through the archives of this list, also the "Registering"  bit -
reading through the archives helped me figure out that meant nothing
too.

Anyway I am moving it to my classroom, and as the school also has a
full shop it will be a good place to have it.  The motor and bellows
seem in good shape, I know it should be totally rebuilt,  but if it is
a glued together stack I think it will be beyond me and I'll just get
it tuned and use it with hopes of maybe getting it rebuilt someday, my
first kid starts college next year and two more right behind him so it
may be awhile!

Bob