Being a former employee of Rippen, the Dutch pianobuilder who had
a plant at Shannon, Ireland, where the Lindner pianos were made, I was
a little bit surprised to read your article on that plastic piano.

It's true, they are light, and they were cheap.  But, to be truthful,
they did in no way sound very well.

I must agree: the idea of manufacturing a lightweight piano in a
factory at Shannon, in order to ship them by air to the USA, was not
bad.  The fact that the Irish gouvernment in those days was willing to
support you financially, if bringing in new industrial activities, was
a major reason for Mr. Rippen to go to Ireland.

Keeping in mind that Rippen was the European distributor for Thomas
organs in those days, and Thomas did sell the Rippen piano in the USA,
the Lindner piano idea was not bad at all.  But as often happens, if
the product does not bring what might be expected (in this case a good
sound, as well as a durable mechanism), there will not be a market for
it.

By the way, the Rippen factory in Holland went broke a couple of years
ago because they continued to build cheap pianos with poor quality.
However, that kind of instrument was produced in huge numbers in the
DDR [the former East Germany], Poland, and so on, and after the Iron
Curtain was opened there no longer was a possibility for Rippen to
survive.  They did try, by moving the machinery to (e.g.) Poland, but
that was not successful.

Nevertheless the Rippen factory was very inventive, and some of their
renewals [improvements] were not bad at all.  The possibility to fold
down the keyboard inside the body is one of them, so you could ship and
move easily more pianos in the same van.  Leaving away the "rast" also
made the piano smaller and lighter, and the triple-layered soundboard
proved to be a crack-free solution.  But mostly the technical solutions
did not work out very well on the tonal qualities of the instrument.
And of course the digital keyboard was also killing the piano market.

I wrote before on this subject; one can find this article in the
MMD Archives [000211 MMDigest].

Jan Kijlstra