I, too, am very saddened by the decision to stop roll production at
QRS.  Mike Walter's article touched on a good idea: what if all of us
gave up a couple of super-sized meals a month at our favorite fast food
restaurant and bought a piano roll or two each month from QRS instead?
I hope that it would keep paper rolls in production from them.

To me, there is a lot more to this story than is on the surface.
Please bear with me, for the loss of the people who have the knowledge
to operate the machines that make the rolls is just as tragic as the
loss of the machines.  For without their knowledge and experience that
can be passed on to younger employees, they will never operate
correctly again.  They will be sitting in a corner, rusting away.

My family had a machine shop for forty years and some of our equipment
was made before World War Two.  As the machines aged, it was the
operators and maintenance people who understood how they operated --
they developed a six sense as to the sounds and vibrations that the
equipment made that knew if it was operating correctly and if an
adjustment was needed.  This information was passed on by apprenticeship
to our younger machinists.  When we sold the plant, the new owners made
a decision a lot like QRS's and the perfectly good equipment eventually
was left to rust away.

I hope, that somehow, all of us that enjoy the machines that play the
paper rolls can prevent another tragedy from happening in our efforts
to preserve the machines.

I recently had an experience with a brother and sister that were ten
and twelve years old.  I told them that I had a reproducing player
piano. They said, oh, one of those pianos that that you put a disk into
and it plays like a computer that move the keys.  Kinda boring!

I said it's kinda like that but it uses a paper roll and a vacuum pump
as well as a bunch of other pneumatic devices to make it play.  They
came over and were so fascinated that two hours later the questions
still were coming and the rolls were still playing!

All I can say in closing is, long live the steam engine, and the
equipment and knowledge to keep pneumatic roll-playing pianos playing!

Randy Petren
r.petren@yahoo.com.geentroep [delete ".geentroep" to reply]