On Tuesday I went to the Tanner building on BYU campus to work on a Kawai RX-3 (6 foot grand piano) and it was missing one of the pins to the lid hinge. I discovered this when I had a student assist me in lifting the lid so I could tighten the screws. It was…
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Spinet pianos were built between about 1930 (The beginning of the Great Depression) and the 1970s. They typically measure only about 36″ in height and were built with less expensive materials such as plastic, Formica and fiber board so that piano players during the post-Depression era could still enjoy music while remaining on a budget.…
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Had quite a successful and fulfilling day today work-wise. Started out by doing a bass string splice on a 1978 Kimball console (buying a new string would have been twice the price). And it turned out sounding nice without any buzzing, even though the splice is in the speaking length of the string. Check it…
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This is one of the very beautiful pianos on BYU campus. This is how it sounded when I was done. (I got to overhear the dress rehearsal for a minute.)
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Had a great time at the joint UT Valley/SL Valley PTG meeting tonight at Baldassin’s Piano. Guest speaker Dan McElrath presented on the future of piano technology. It was exciting in many ways, especially hearing him say that in spite of all the contributions technology plays, and will continue to play, in the piano world…
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It’s getting there; here’s the tenor strings and bridge before rebuild: Here is the same post-rebuild: More to come!
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This is turning out to be a very fun project – I’ve got more pictures too, so stay tuned to this rebuilding process! PLATE INSTALLATION VIDEO – CLICK HERE! Here’s a pic of the plate having been hoisted out of the piano (but still click the vid above to see me putting it back in!)
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The customer just wanted the basics done (new strings, hammers, dampers, cleaning, etc.). They didn’t want new key tops, even though these have very noticeable chips in them. Some people just like keeping that original ivory look – that’s cool with me. I love the feel of ivory when I’m playing, especially clean ivories! So…
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Now for the bridges. They didn’t need to be recapped, but I did need to clean them up. Hopefully you can see the before and afters here: There’s a bass bridge as well which is not depicted in these pictures. If the below picture were bigger the bass bridge would show up in the bottom…
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Here is what we did to the pin block to reinforce the tuning stability. It didn’t need to be replaced, but we did sure up the tuning pins by 1st, drilling little counter sinks into each tuning pin hole: Then we reinsert the old tuning pins just slightly and fill those counter sinks with…
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