Thank you to all who gave me advice several months ago on how best to
disassemble a Melville Clark Apollo upright in order to remove it from
my mother's basement.  A friend and I successfully got the thing apart
and out the door.  In the process we discovered:

 - The stack appears to be in great condition, and came out with
relatively little work.  It was shimmed from the factory with an odd
assortment of scrap wood blocks, and further shimmed with a number of
flat wooden tasting spoons.  The pedal assembly similarly came out
entire and easily.

 - The keys lifted out of the key bed easily.  Each was stamped with
a unique number, from bass to treble, saving us having to pencil in
sequence numbers.

 - The entire keybed, front legs and the cross piece through which
the pedals poked, came away after unscrewing 13 fasteners.  We had to
remove the drive motor and one of the driven bellows frame to get to
the right hand fasteners.  We wound up removed the entire pulley
assembly (with the attached bellows and frames).

 - The action similarly came out with little fuss.

 - Even with most of the piano gutted, the remaining case (back, sides,
lyre and sounding board, and water-damaged bottom) was _heavy._  We
rented a four-caster dolly, and found with a bit of careful manhandling
it was straightforward to upend the case onto the dolly and move it out
to the basement door.  A makeshift ramp and some jockeying got the case
safely down the 10" threshold to the garage floor, and we then tipped
it into the trailer and pushed it home.

 - The piano bottom had deteriorated into three narrow, delaminated
boards.  I drilled fresh pilot holes and drove screws to ensure the
boards were secured to the bottom before we shoved the thing around.
A new bottom will need to be fashioned.

What was most interesting to me was the evidence of roughness of
assembly in the hidden parts of the instrument.  Wood had been roughly
whacked away to allow clearance for one of the motor-driven bellows,
for instance.  Also, many of the parts were under-fastened: brackets
were unfastened, and the rear of the keybed wasn't fastened to mounting
ledges cast into the lyre.  There were a number of pneumatics (small
bellows and one valve) that had no corresponding tubing.

From the nut shells and droppings and other garbage in the keybed, this
piano was evidently home to many mice over many years.  We even found
a large stash of "DCon" pellets under the high treble keys, but no
expired mice.  The felting on the hammers and other parts of the action
were in surprisingly good condition, with little if any mouse damage,
but it has deteriorated to the point of replacement due to age and lack
of maintenance (most of the hammers are badly grooved.)

So, off into boxes the parts go, and into the garage the case and
keybed go, all to await restoration.  As Arnold said in "T1",
"I'll be back!"

Rod Sprattling