This is the second time I will have written about how to tube a
nickelodeon.  My neighbor, Chris Kalstone, passed away in November.
He had a modest collection of coin pianos to go with his massive
collection of jukeboxes.  His wife has disposed of most of the
collection.  He would come by for visits, usually with questions
like "How did you know how to tube this?"

Well, you just have to figure it out.  There are no tubing diagrams
that I am aware for any coin piano.  If you know the tracker bar scale
and you rebuilt all of the parts then you should have an idea of what
the parts did.  Just match the parts to the tracker scale.

An "A" roll piano tracker bar scale, looking at the holes on the front
of the bar [from left to right], is

1. Soft pedal,
2. Sustain Pedal,
3. Play,
4-61. Playing notes,
62. Extra instrument, usually pipes or a xylophone,
63. Rewind,
64. Mandolin (Rinky Tink),
65. Shut off.

The playing notes are usually the notes on the pneumatic action stack.
An exception may be in the small cabinet models that hole 4 plays the
second note on the stack because the first note is tweed to the same
note an octave up.  If all the nipples are pointing up but the lowest
note has an elbow with the note 12 notes up having two nipples then
that lowest note was meant to play with that note up on the stack.

The second playing note is the lowest note on the tracker scale in that
case.  Otherwise the music roll will play the piano in a different key.
In the treble you may run out of notes so then those upper notes are
teed in to the lower notes on the stack so the roll does not miss any
playing notes.

The Nelson-Wiggen, Cremona, Seeburg, Western Electric and others have
a unit that shifts the gears in the transmission.  This unit has two
valves.  One for play and one for rewind.  Some of these units have a
third nipple that is opened when the gears are in the rewind position
that operates a unit to shut off vacuum to the stack and other valve
units that work soft pedal, sustain pedal, mandolin, and coin off.
You do not want these other units working as the roll rewinds.

Somewhere in the piano are valves to work the sustain pedal, soft
pedal, coin off, mandolin, and extra instrument.  These are tubed to
the corresponding tracker bar hole.  An exception is in some pianos
there are not enough valves to work all these units so they have the
soft pedal and mandolin work from one common valve.

The two nipples on the unit that shifts the gears to make the piano
play or rewind are tubed to the correct tracker bar holes.  In some
coin pianos there is a single valve that has vacuum all the time.  It
is used in pianos that have a pneumatic to advance the counter wheel
in the coin accumulator.  This allows each coin dropped into the piano
to play another tune.  Most pianos can take twenty coins to play twenty
songs before cutting off.

Cremona pianos, for example, use the large rewind pneumatic to move
a slide over the vacuum supply to the stack.  Seeburg has a pneumatic
that closes and cuts off the stack vacuum controlled by a valve.

I guess this is clear as mud.

Don Teach
Shreveport, Louisiana
musicguy@nwla.com.geentroep [delete ".geentroep" to reply]