I purchased one of these Telektra 88-note units which belonged to the
Selfridge family which was installed in the ballroom of their 100 room
mansion which was a summer residence on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.  Due to
the excessive humidity, the brass roll system was chosen.  I was in the
house prior to the demolition and can attest that the corrosion to
metals was astonishing, since it was not heated or occupied in winter.

Incidentally, they had an 1899 Tubular Pneumatic Kimball Player Pipe
organ 2/11 which I rescued.  The piano is a Chickering Brothers
(Chicago) manufacture and had to be removed with a crane since the main
staircase had been removed.  The roll drive has lots of die-cast pot
metal and had to have all gears recut in brass.  It presently operates.

Just this last year I was at a garage sale and someone told me that
a friend had a player piano but you put the rolls in a separate unit.
I called them up and it was in a small house in the outskirts of
St.  Joseph, Missouri, of all places!  I walked in and there is another
88-note unit.  The gentleman was 88 years old, and after inspecting the
unit, he asked me if I wanted to hear it play.  This unit was nearly
100 years old and to my amazement he flipped the switch and the piano
came to life.

The gears appear to be brass and there are minor differences from my
other unit, serial number 1821, and the newly discovered unit, serial
number 1556.  The player was installed in a piano in a small town
across the river (Elwood, Kansas) and in the 1950s was donated to a
church which did not want the console or player mechanism.  At that
time it would have gone to the dump but fortunately the old gentleman
rescued it and removed the mechanism and installed it in the family
1900 upright.

That's no small task for an amateur, as the piano keys had to be removed,
the keybed cut out so that the connecting rods could be attached to the
underside of the key blanks which are then inserted through the keybed
and connected to the corresponding electromagnets of the stack mounted
under the keyboard.  This is no easy task and is probably why the magnet
banks were not saved with only the console being dragged away.

Gregory Filardo