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Before my wife and I were married we were given an antique piano for the cost of the U-Haul to drag it home. Neither of us play (I took lessons for years but I still suck!) but it looked good and I figured I could fix it up "one of these days". Fast-Forward 11 years and our kids are of piano-lesson age. I finally decided it was time to get off my duff and fix the thing. The cabinetry is not perfect but it is authentic and looks good enough so that gets left alone. That left several inoperative keys, a broken pedal mechanism, and some really dirty ivory.
Next step: Triage. I knew several keys were dead and that the little "bridle straps" that tie the hammer mechanism together were brittle and in many cases broken. So I removed the action from the piano and put it on my kitchen island for examination. In the picture you can see some hammers are missing. I found all but one laying in the piano. I also found a missing hammer butt that was totally MIA (if you care what these parts are you can see a picture here). Everything was filthy. The bridle straps are the red tabs you can see along the lower third of the action. Broken bridle straps are the reason the bottoms of some of the hammer mechanisms seem to sag. The good news is that the felt parts and hammers seem to be in excellent shape. There is no insect or rodent damage and the parts are firmly attached. I saw several tuner's signatures on the harp from around 1981 so I suspect many of these parts were replaced then. After some calling around I found Steve Van Natten who runs an excellent piano repair site. He also was willing to sell individual hammers (many places would only sell complete sets for much $$!). I bought two new hammers (in case I buggered one), a new hammer butt, a
dozen hammer shanks, a full set of bridle straps, some brass tubes for repairing
hammer shanks, some rubber buttons, and two knobs for the cabinet. Grand
total was about $50 with shipping and it took about 3 days to arrive. I am
very pleased!
First I removed a good hammer to use as a model and cut a new shank to length. I then assembled the new hammer butt, hammer, and shank into a complete assembly. Next came the old hammers with broken shanks. My first instinct was to remove the old shanks and replace them. Then I realized I could mix and match the parts to make full-length shanks then use the brass splice tubes to join them. After some careful measurements, cutting, and gluing I ended up with this:
Here is the complete action: Not bad! Some of green backcheck blocks are out of line. I am not sure if that is a problem or not. It can be adjusted but I will leave that to a professional. Notice how nicely the chrome cleaned up. The problem with pedal turned out to be the wooden blocks the pedals pivot in. Two of them split and the pedal was free to just flop around. As usual I started doing it the hard way (making new blocks) when I realized I could just flip the existing blocks over. I re-drilled the holes for the pedal pivots and put everything back together. Works great but I did not get a good picture. My wife and I replaced the action in the piano and tested. It needs tuned in the worst way but everything works! I still need to replace the rubber bumpers on the cabinet and put the cabinet back together. I will probably get it tuned first so I can have a professional check out my work.
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