Dear Members and readers,  I am writing this as a brief introduction
to you about myself, and my interest in player and reproducing pianos.
Already I have had contact with some of you in the past year since
discovering the MMD.  My name is Brenton Jenkins and I live in the
Barossa Valley region of South Australia (one of the worlds finest
wine making areas).

My interest in pianos began twenty years ago whilst trying to naively
tune my old piano at home.  Being a musician I thought this would be
an easy job.  The rest is history: I shyly contacted the technician
that I bought the piano from to come and fix my shambles.

This man kindly set me in the right direction towards piano tuning and
repair and after a lot of tutoring from him, and many hours research
and many tunings of my old piano and others, I became competent at this
art.  (When I say 'competent' I mean that the day I stop learning and
improving will be the day I die.)

Some 15 years ago I restored my first player, without any help from
books such as Art Reblitz' great book (that I now own), and thus had to
do it again some years later using some better techniques.  Since then
my passion for these instruments has grown.  I have restored many of
these instruments now and all of them that I know of are still working
fine to this day.  Mind you, a few of the earlier ones needed some
minor correction and adjustment.  I am amazed at the amount of
information I have received from this site and will be eternally
grateful for it.

My current projects are a couple of Weber upright Duo-Art pianos,
circa 1925 and 1926, and a Jumbo Gulbransen circa 1927.  The Gully is
the first valve unit stack that I have attempted as I haven't seen many
of these nor the Simplex action in South Australia.  I sincerely thank
everyone for their input and certainly hope to be of help to some of
you in the future.

Robbie, if you can send some details on how to get a subby payment
to you, I will be more than happy to contribute.

Cheers
Brenton Jenkins
South Australia

 [ Thanks, Brenton, for thinking of our welfare.  ;-)  Contributions
 [ may be sent to The Foxtail Group, P. O. Box 502230, San Diego,
 [ CA 92150-2230.  More information is in the 'boilerplate' at the end
 [ of each email MMDigest, and at http://mmd.foxtail.com/store.html
 [ -- Robbie