1880's seems awful late for leather hammers; late squares often have leather covering the treble hammers, but I haven't seen any grands of this age with the same. If all the damage incurred from a previous "restoration" is a new set of hammers and 3 ruined plate threads, count yourself and your client lucky, especially if the hammers are light enough to work. If this piano has an antique ribbing design and a single bridge scale , it will sound different even if restrung, but not bad; I find it disheartening when technicians write instruments off because they are old, worse when modernization occurs from a notion that newer is better. In this case the damage is repairable. New metal can replace the drilled out parts of the webbing, the difficult part is finding three pins and the appropriate tap. Since it seems that semblances both of authenticity and of tuning are of interest to your customer, I would lean toward replacing the block and restringing with the original pins. They are beautiful pianos. (...and I just got a customer with a falling apart, urethane refinished, plastic keytop 1887(!) S&S square for which they paid $10k...) Clark ps, from http://www.datrix.co.za/docs/htmltags/TAG_XMP.html "The XMP element displays text inside this tag as it is in the file, so all white space and line breaks are shown. Also characters that are normally interpreted as special HTML characters like > and < are displayed. Note: The HTML 3.2 specification mentions this tag as obsolete, and discourages further use of the tag. You should use the PRE tag instead."
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