I'm sorry if I sound hostile to this idea of gutting a perfectly good
Mason & Hamlin.  Lets look at it another way.

How about if I take a Paillard cylinder box, gut it, and put the works
in a Regina case?  I always liked Regina cases, and the larger case
might give it a totally distinctive sound.  And someone else will get
a perfectly nifty cigar box.  So where's the loss?

The point is that to be a "devout preservationist" you have to look
at the whole piece as a unit, not as a piano with pieces that can be
removed to suit your own purpose.  Anyone can come up with a rational
for doing what they want with the instrument that happens to be in
their possession at this particular point in time.  Wouldn't that
Victrola make a real nice speaker cabinet?

I recently delivered the case to a Violano Virtuoso that had all the
guts removed out of it.  Where are the guts?  Who knows.  Maybe someone
made fishing weights out of them.  Someone gets to catch fish, somebody
else gets the makings of a bookcase.  Where's the loss?  How many times
have we had forwarded posts in MMDigest from people looking for the
guts to a player piano?

As a restorer for over 30 years, how many times have I opened a
nickelodeon and found drums, pipes or xylophones or something else
missing, original motors thrown away, keys with paint slopped all
over them, corners cut off the sides of cases; you name it, I've seen
it.  I'm sure in all those cases, the owners at the time had their
reasons for doing what they did.  It doesn't alter the fact that the
machine has been changed and it is sometimes nearly impossible to
return them to their original state for the present owners.

Another point I'd like to make is that selling a reproducing piano
on eBay is like trying to sell a refrigerator to the bush people of
South America.  That's why you got higher bids for a gutted piano.
A refrigerator would make a really neat canoe if you took the door
off and threw away all that nasty machinery underneath.

Selling a reproducing piano is hard to do when it isn't playing, even
to people who know what it is.  It takes a special person with a
combination of a preservation mindset, and a love of real music and
mechanics, and who will spend the thousands of dollars necessary to
make one play again as it was designed to.

I would sell the Mason & Hamlin to someone who appreciates what it
could do once restored, even if they can't afford to restore it right
now.  Believe it or not, they are out there.  I live in a rented house,
the square footage of which doesn't equal some of my customers
bathrooms, but if someone offered me $2,000 for my unrestored Haines
grand and all I had to do was remove the guts, I'd send them down the
road, because I don't have what they want.

Just because you can't sell something for cash money doesn't make it
worthless.  "I can't make a buck on this so I think I'll gut it and
sell it as a regular piano."  This is the argument that the shops used
to use to gut players by the thousands.  It's bad enough on a pedal
pumper, but unconscionable on a top-of-the-line Mason & Hamlin, no
matter what happens to the parts afterwards.

As far as "stepping up to the plate" and buying that piano, do you
really need the profit you'll make on it, or is it just a case of
making a deal?  I'd love to have a Mason & Hamlin.  If I lived in
California, I'd trade my J.C. Fischer Ampico for it and the homeless
restored guts of a reproducing system (not the stack) for it.  That way
you'd have the a piano to sell with the guts in it, and you'd still
have the reproducing system to schlep into the Yamaha.  Otherwise
I couldn't afford it.

I say again, get a Disklavier and have it installed in the Yamaha and
you can play with the volume control knob to get all the dynamics you
are capable of hearing.

Tony Marsico