> ... I connected up the motor and the pump goes backwards --
> the arrow on the pump case tells me this.  I tried swapping the wires
> and looking for other ways but it goes the same way each time.  Does
> it matter?  The pump still works.  Is there something I am missing?

That's interesting.  If your pump works the way many industrial piston
or bellows pumps work, it indeed may not matter except for matters
involved in lubrication: some bearings are set up to pull oil away from
seals by means of a helical grinding pattern on the shaft.  It may be
that whoever replaced the motor last found out that the motor ran the
wrong way after he'd tightened the last bolt, found that the pump
worked anyway, and pronounced it adequate.

AC motors won't reverse when you reverse the polarity of the power
line.  (Most DC motors won't, either, for that matter, unless they have
permanent magnets.)  What you have to do to reverse most motors, if
indeed they are designed to be reversed at all, is to remove a little
cover plate and reverse a couple of internal leads therein.  Generally
this means that you have to remove the motor to get at the cursed
little plate.  You also have to figure out which leads to put where
because most induction motors have multiple configurations in there.
This requires you to find an instruction plate somewhere on the motor.

The sport in this exercise is derived from the fact that this
instruction 'plate' may be a paper label that disintegrated in 1943,
or was painted over, or is in French, or was never installed to begin
with, or was lost along with the cover plate on which it was printed.
Most motors are pretty standard, though, so you can probably figure out
how to reverse it anyway from a book about motors.

I know little of pianos, either player or reproducer, but on the basis
of many happy hours of other sorts of repair work I'm tempted to tell
you to leave it alone.  Someone may have put in a weird coupling
that'll unscrew, or the pump itself may somehow have been assembled
backwards, or the arrow that indicates the direction of rotation may be
painted upon a cover plate that has since been re-installed
upside-down.

Let us know how it comes out.

Mark Kinsler