To Andy Millard and the MMDer's, regarding the strange stack in the
Kranich & Bach Welte for sale in Connecticut [090415 MMDigest] --
please rescue and restore this piano!

Gee, I wish this piano wasn't sitting on the other side of the
country from where I am in Seattle or I'd be there now.  (I'll give
it a good home if someone wants to mail it to me!)  I hope it will find
a new home and be given lots of TLC.  It is getting very hard to find
reproducers that are complete and unmolested, especially in such a nice
style as this one is let alone knowing its musical potential once
lovingly restored.  Hopefully this one will be.

I had one like it (but in a plain case) years ago that was lost in
a fire.  It was the first reproducing piano I bought, out of a barn,
with fourteen coats of Sears WeatherBeater white paint applied with
a mop.  I paid _way_ too much for it but at least I had the Welte
out of the piano when the building it was in burned to the ground.

Eventually I used those parts in re-Welte-ing a gutted one someone else
turned up later on.  Anyway, short grands are generally unremarkable
for the most part, but this little Kranich & Bach was particularly
well-scaled and more lovingly made than most other entry-level small
grand pianos mass produced then, or even now.

I don't know if this was done in any of the other dozens of "Brand X"
pianos that the Welte Licensee was installed in but for some reason
Kranich & Bach used a pneumatic stack of their own design in only K&B
players.  Everything else is typical Kohler / Standard Pneumatic /
Auto-DeLuxe except the actual note-playing pneumatic stack.  (Every
other Licensee I've seen is the double-valve three tier Standard stack
Kohler Industries made regardless of the piano make)

It's hard to see but looks like this piano probably has the very
unusual stack made by Kranich & Bach.  It was a two-tier chest mounted
"sideways" with the pneumatics opening towards the floor, they were
connected with a series of horizontally traveling metal rods that
hooked into a wooden bellcrank that transferred the motion to a
vertically rising wooden dowel under each key.  You can just barely
make out the bell-cranks connecting the stack to the keys, just like
the ones I remember seeing in my piano.

It's unlike any other pneumatic stack the way it's mounted in the grand
but what's really weird is the K&B "kissing valves" that transfer
vacuum to each individual pneumatic.  This is difficult to explain
without pictures but it functions like this:  the pouch receiving the
signal from the tracker bar inflates and pushes a secondary o-ring
pouch (nainsook? looked like Schulz pouch cloth from PPCo) that had
about a dime size fibre washer, leather faced, and when opening that
they travelled forward a fraction of an inch to a mating aluminum ring
in the middle of the pneumatic itself.  So that the application of
vacuum was transferred _though_ the valve itself instead of over and
around it as it is in most every player thing else.

Like I said, it's a very unusual stack.  It was undoubtedly more labor
intensive to manufacture and regulate but I suppose they thought they
had a better mousetrap...  I guess if they're airtight and perfectly
regulated they worked as well as the Standard stack but hardly superior
in my opinion, excepting the Rube Goldberg weirdness factor.

I don't think they had primary valves, so maybe if their facility had
all the jigs and hardware in place they saved a little not having to
buy double valve stacks from Standard and "rolling their own" to save
money.  Who knows...  Maybe they were just that egotistical about their
product since they went to so much trouble to make it "unique" which
it most definitely was.

I sincerely hope this piano is rescued from the burn pile and I only
wish it were closer so I could be first in line to hoist it home.  The
most experienced rebuilder is going to find the stack restoration equal
to the Schultz-Gulbransen level of fit throwing, but it will work fine
if everything is _exactly_ like it was and airtight.  Worth the grief
though considering the scale designers must have been devoted to getting
the best balanced tone into a small case instead of re-inventing the
angle of the key capstans or hiding middle C in one of the legs.  And
after all, isn't this just a pretty little piano?  I will get a larger
post office box in case someone wants to send it to me; I need it to
play the one Welte roll I have titled "Welte Test Roll".

Maybe we'll see more later about this piano or someone else out there
has one of these stacks and could post some pictures and more info
regarding this very odd piano playing contraption.

Eric Shoemaker - Seattle regional useless information department
i2npianos@comcast.net