I was interested in the time to rebuild question, which let me to the
question of how long did it take to make a player piano in the first
place.  So I tried a very rough, back of the envelope calculation of
the labor in a player piano.

If a good player piano retailed for $500 in 1920, a reasonable guess
based on the ads I was able to find (surprisingly few), then assuming
standard retail markup of 50% and wholesale markup of 10%, the
manufacturers selling price would have been $200.  Guessing a 10%
profit margin, the manufacturing cost should be about $180.

A semi-skilled factory worker in 1920 made $30 a week.  I don't have
the right number for the typical work week used to generate that
number, but it was probably around 50 hours.  So if the cost of all
the materials in a player piano were zero, that suggests a player
piano couldn't have taken more than 300 person-hours to build.

In fact the material costs were not zero, and even then there were
executives to be paid, costs for space, insurance, loan interest, etc,
etc.  Purely guessing now that the cost was half labor and half
materials and other costs, that puts the labor required for building
a player piano from earth, air, fire and water at 150 person-hours max,
or 19 8-hour days.  If we arbitrarily say that the player mechanism is
half of the player piano (selling prices of a player were often about
twice that of a "silent" piano), then that suggests that the player
could be built with about 9.5 8-hour days of labor (76 person-hours).

This, of course, says absolutely nothing about what it takes to rebuild
one today, as the rebuilder has none of the economies of scale and
specialized tooling that a factory would have used.

It would be interesting to attempt to use the production numbers from a
factory divided by the number of employees to see if the numbers
remotely match up.  I'd be interested if anyone actually knows the real
numbers.

As a reality check, a Model T Ford, which sold for a similar price,
took 119 person-hours of labor to build in the most advanced
manufacturing environment of the day.  (Number obtained by dividing the
production of Ford's major plant by the total number of employees at
the plant in 1914).  Other similar cars took more than twice as much
labor.

Cheers,
Roger WIegand
Wayland, Massachusetts, USA
http://www.carouselorgan.com/