Hi,  I read Damon Atchison's posting about his the Chickering
upright player piano and I want to add my encouragement.  Take heart
-- it's a hard job but it is rewarding, and a lot of fun.

I had my Ampico restored (the Knabe grand) several years ago and
it cost $5000 for the piano restoration alone, and the pinblock,
soundboard and bridges were perfect, as was the piano action.  The cost
factors were refinishing the piano, replacing the hammers and strings
and a lot of labour in regulation, voicing and stabilizing the tuning.
(New strings need to be tuned several times before they hold their
pitch correctly.)

The end result was a piano that sounded better than most very expensive
new pianos available.  I restored the Ampico mechanism myself.  It was
a real learning experience and I made a lot of mistakes and had to
learn to correct them as well, but they worked out in the end.

The task seems endless and maybe you will not want to go through with
it in the end, but if it's any encouragement, the Chickering upright is
one of the best sounding upright pianos ever made so it justifies the
expense.

Moving expenses:  there are piano movers that will add your job to
another moving job that they have already taken and cut your expenses
considerably.  I bought a Sohmer upright from Robin Pratt and he
helped arrange a mover that added it to another moving job and I paid
less than half of what I would have if they moved it specially for me
(something to consider!).

Restoring the piano: a cracked pinblock is expensive to replace,
but it's not the end of the world.  You would of course need to add
restringing it at that point, but a piano that age probably wants new
strings and hammers, and at that stage, shimming the soundboard is
a minor burden so have it fixed at the same time.  We are talking about
a couple thousand dollars at the least here, but again you will have at
the end a superb instrument.

Restoring the Ampico action -- take it slowly and ask for advice about
everything: the tools to buy, which leather to use, which cloth for
each part of the mechanism, techniques about hot-glue, rebuilding the
valves -- in short, everything for each part.  The Ampico is a
demanding system, but not impossible and the results are fabulous.

Eliyahu Shahar