Given the amount of money available, why not use it to buy wippens, hammer shanks from Renner this year, and a set of S&S Hammers? You might also be able to squeeze enough out of them to rebush the keys this year. Then, have them budget $ for the action replacement during the coming fiscal year. This way, they can also pay you for your labor, but in another fiscal cycle. Since this is a "workhorse" piano rather than a performance instrument, why refinish it? The college can save thousands of dollars which would be better spent elsewhere. Given the age, and condition of the board and bridges, I would recommend rebuilding rather than restringing. How much downbearing/crown is present? If ok, then why not repair rather than replace the soundboard? If not, it would be quite foolish to restring the piano and then have the tone die due to loss of crown. In the meantime, try putting protek on the rusty strings between the agraffe and tuning pins. BTW, I would use the german made blued tuning pins from Pianotek rather than those from S&S. They are very uniform-no point in micing them all. (Not to say that S&S pins are necesarily bad, just that the Pianotek supplied pins are very good.Another possibility on the rusty strings-clean them with a product called DeoxIT 5 from Caig Labs,Inc. This is an electrical contact cleaner that is supposed to work very well on strings that won't render across bearing points. I don't have the name of a distributor, but I'll look for it and repost later. David Graham dgrahm@niu.edu
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