You can select up an outdated antique piano for $400. I know, since I just sold one. But how do you know if it’s well worth getting at all? Will it be repairable and will it be Ok for your child to find out on? You need to have to know what to appear for.
The wrest plank and tuning pins of my Moore & Moore upright piano all seemed excellent. It was one particular of the greatest I would at any time noticed in that regard–there was no evidence of broken or abused pins, they all seemed first, none experienced been hammered in, none experienced marks on them, they have been not bent and there had been no indications of cracks or other damage to the wrest plank. The seem board (the premier piece of wooden, powering the strings in the centre of the instrument) experienced no cracks possibly, and the strings all appeared fine. The action (the moving parts) labored properly on all the notes, and the dampers stopped the audio of each and every be aware when you lifted the essential or elevated the damper pedal. There was a single missing plastic crucial, but that would be effortless to substitute. Most old pianos would not search so very good on the within.
Then, a few of months later I obtained a grievance from the extremely let down customer:
“Hello Margaret. After we experienced the piano shipped we obtained a piano tuner out and were genuinely let down…it was not able to be tuned…when the tuner attempted to tighten the pins they would unwind straight away and she explained it was no excellent at all…so we have employed a piano. When the guys came out to produce the [new] piano they also said “No, that is cactus…”
But the piano was actually quite tunable, and the inside of workings ended up in very great situation. At some point, following much more tips from me, the customer realised he’d located a extremely usable instrument.
The talent of the tuner is paramount to trying to keep the strings and tuning pins ‘on pitch.’ When living in Piano transport london of Karratha, I taught myself to tune a very outdated piano in much worse problem than this. I also did some tunings on a pair of my students’ old pianos. In all circumstances it was quite tough to hold them in tune for far more than a handful of minutes, partly owing to my very poor technique with the tuning hammer (lever). However, when a professional tuner came to city he did a wonderful task and the 3 rickety outdated pianos stayed properly in tune for several months.
When a piano has not been tuned for some several years it may need a lot more than 1 tuning to ‘come up to pitch.’ It’s not possible to know how well this is going to pan out, you can only try it and see how numerous tunings it wants. The strings have tonnes of tension and you have to wait around for the tension to even out prior to doing another tuning. It can take months prior to the tuning settles.
When he acquired my Moore & Moore piano I instructed him it essential re-hydrating (it needed far more h2o or moisture in the wooden). If the wrest plank had dried out the pins would definitely be free. In Karratha we re-hydrated all a few outdated pianos and it created a Massive variation. The straightforward heal is to place a beaker of water within the piano at the bottom. The larger, the far better, since people have a tendency to overlook about them and they ultimately run out of h2o. It normally takes weeks to have an result. This re-hydrating also seemed to resolve an action difficulty that two of our pianos experienced. Some tuners will not like drinking water beakers, they reckon they will cause problems with the action or rust the strings so specialist advice must be sought from a professional technician, but it worked well for us. There are commercially-accessible humidifiers/de-humidifiers specially manufactured for pianos.
Yet another low-cost technique to aid with the tuning is to hammer the pins into the wrest plank. It’s a standard remedy but you will find a limit to how considerably and how usually the pins can be hammered in. The pins on this old piano looked like they’d in no way been hammered at all, so that was still a viable selection. It’s absolutely a task for a competent piano technician, to stay away from damage to the pins or wrest plank.
A much far more high-priced strategy is to change the pins with greater pins (they occur in various sizes), but it would be a huge endeavor and it would be cheaper to get one more piano.