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 kind of frightening because it almost came crashing down.

This is what it looked like without the hinge pin in:

Today I went to the same piano with a small kit of various sizes of hinge lid pins, but none of them fit. They were either too small or too big. About 30 minutes into my service call I was considering my options, which included going to Summerhayes music and finding what they had in store, and as a last resort calling Kawai and ordering the part. In total time this probably would have taken at least an hour.

At one point in time as I was walking around the room I stepped on the kit of hinge lid pins and screws and they went flying all over the place. I sat down to clean up my mess and once everything was back in place I looked down to my left and the very hinge pin that had been lost was sitting no more than 1 foot away from me! Now I had looked through every hinge pin in the entire two kits that I had and I was sure that none of them fit, and that the original hinge pin was not previously anywhere to be found.

I believed in miracles before, but now I really believe!

So here’s what the piano looks like with the lid hinge pin reinstalled:

The other hinge was bent as a result of the missing hinge pin when someone had previously tried to open it and so I also bent that back into shape. Here’s what it looked like before:

And here’s what it looks like now:

The screws had also stripped out so I filled those holes and by the time I was done everything was perfectly tight and back into place!

I love my job!