Zorba's "Secret" Piano Page
The Pie-Anna!
Miscellaneous Repairs.
28 March 2008, page 2
eBay tool find, pin driver (top) and coil former (bottom).
Another eBay find, Schaff key easing pliers.
Del Fandrich's reprise of the classic "Piano Tone Building",
A fascinating read!
Key easing pliers in use.
The little black wooden block with bumper was missing from the other side...
So I fabricated one myself...
And installed it there!
Triple image tells the tale of plugging and redrilling this eyebolt
on the old pedal door. Works much better now!
Removal of old felt from "key stop rail".
Installing new felt with hot hide glue...
All done (deployed position)!
Retracted view.
Update 04/20/08: Added little brass knobs to the old player doors!Yes, these pictures are a bit out of sequence, obviously the events on this page took place before the piano was reassembled as per the previous page!
As can be seen at the top of the page, some more eBay tools have found their way to me - at very good prices. In fact, the two in the top photo, the pin driver and coil former, were purchased from the same guy who sold me my Piano Action Model! I'll need these if I ever decide to restring the instrument or need to replace another string (in fact, I "may" need to replace the string that I replaced right after acquiring this instrument - the beckets (wire coils) on that string are not the greatest).
The Schaff key easing pliers were another good find - I won't even confess how I was easing keys before this - effective, but very tedious. As I had several keys that needed easing, I took care of this while I was taking things apart. A comment to piano tool makers: I'm tired of having to put heat shrink on the handles of piano tools to make them less slippery. Please consider either coating the handles with plastic, or better still, knurling them! At this point, I'm a bit surprised, but gratified that the coil former is knurled.
The rest amount to a bunch of more-or-less "who cares anyway" type repairs that have been bugging me for some time. The black wood stop was missing on one side of the sliding doors for the (long gone) roll mechanism. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with these doors; leave them as is, screw them permanently shut, replace with cloth, replace with fretwork or a grill, replace with a painting on canvas or glass - who knows? So for now, I wanted them to function correctly, so I fabricated a similar wood stop for the side that had none, painted it black, and affixed a rubber headed tack as original.
Another stupid repair had to do with the pedal door down by the floor. It slides up and down with a lever under the keybed. It would not stay all the way up on its own as the eyebolt that attaches the balance spring was only about 3/8" into the wood, and had pulled sideways. There was no way the old toothpicks and glue fix was going to work here; so I drilled it out with a Forstner bit, glued in a dowel, cut the dowel flush, drilled a new pilot hole, and screwed the eyebolt back in quite a bit further this time! I even touched up the exposed end of the dowel with a black "Sharpie" marking pen so it would match the (black) wood where it was installed. Door works much better now.
Then there was the situation with the "key stop rail". This is the rail under the keys that an under keybed knob will deploy to hold the keys up (as seen elsewhere on this site) - originally allowed the player to prevent the keys from going up and down when playing a roll. I use it to hold the keys up when I remove the action. The original felt was a lot like the original keybed felts, rotten and moth eaten, so I replaced it with some leftover key bushing felt. Looks great now!
Lastly, not shown, but I needed to shorten the left hand mount for the practice mute by about 3/16", it was straining the bolt on that side.
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