Julian Dyer correctly says, "Get a sort-of-working player into
a house and the kids will most likely use it, and some will get more
interested."

This is also how I started, only the piano (a Brewster upright) had
been gutted, and I longed for the missing equipment, whatever it was.
I could only imagine, as I used it for my lesson piano, what had been
ripped out.  No one could give a reasonable excuse as to why the parts
were gone.  "No one knows how to fix those parts," was a bad explanation,
because I -- a born tinkerer, descendant of tinkerers on both sides of
the family -- knew that broken equipment can be, indeed, _must_ be
fixed.  Eventually I went to college and the piano went away.

Many years later I was able to buy a restored Brewster upright, just
the same as my lesson piano, but it had a full set of Standard gizzards.
It works fine, needs occasional tinkering, and eventually will withstand
another rebuild.

Moral: Those words, "sort-of-working", can have an exceptionally wide
latitude, especially on the lower end.  A working and pristine Ampico,
in fact, would have been less of an inspiration, because it would have
been surrounded by the admonition, "Don't touch!" or "Nicht fuer die
Kinder!"

Peter Neilson