At our school, we have 28 Steinway uprights on inventory and while none of these pianos are heavily used, I felt obligation to maximize their useful life. So we decided to see what could be done within reason to improve these 35-40 year pianos. We perform the following work on one upright each year. Grind off completely the plate bar in the upper two treble sections; replace the bar with pressure bar felt; polish friction points thoroughly; pull all treble bridge pins and tighten as necessary (epoxy); restring (usually) with 2 and 3/8ths long, #3/0 pins; new hammers and damper felts. (We do not replace the bass strings). This work has made these instruments MUCH more technician friendly. They are more tunable, less wild strings, improved tone with Abel hammers. Much of this work is done by my part time assistant. After doing 4-5 of these, we plan to continue this improvement because the end result seems to justify the labor and relatively small cost.
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