on 5/9/00 4:09 PM, John Minor at jminor@uiuc.edu wrote: > How do others keep the grime from building up on the pianos? We have 21 > Steinways M's that are just 2 years old and look awful. What works? I know > hermetically sealing them might do, but the students just wouldn't go for > that! : ) > > John Minor > University of Illinois > John, On the outside we do Murphy's oil soap. Don't cringe, but in practice rooms I wax the case with McQuire's car wax. Seems to hold up under the constant barrage of book bags, and coats that get thrown on top of the lid. For the inside we also use Murphy's for the board and clean the strings with 3M scratchies. Blow out the action and under the plate . I then make a cover for the entire plate area from curtain material and insulation board sticks. The sticks keeps the material from sagging onto the strings. Once a year we pull out the covers and look at the nice clean strings, soundboard and pin area. It was not without a moderate degree of resistance that the string covers became part of the piano. We charge a fee for reinstallling the covers if they are 'vandalized'. Many pianists believed that the covers dampened the sound. But after blindfold tests where our pianists could not tell me when the lid was up or down, they went away grumbling and have now (3 years later) stopped pulling the covers. I believe this is the cornerstone of keeping your inventory at a good level. A junky piano just gets treated like junk - no matter what it sounds like or how the action responds. End of philosophy PNO Joel
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