A Glut of Old Uprights

[Tom Cole]

I may have once written to this list about a piano which I had first
tuned to 100 cents flat and was, on the return visit, suddenly "up to
pitch". The old upright had broken 3 strings in the first few notes of
the temperament and thus to get A4 even close to 440Hz would have been a
futile effort. But the engineer-owner with perfect pitch soon found that
the instrument was useless to him and his solution was to transpose the
keyboard up one half step. 

This was many years ago and the piano finally sold, a few years back, to
someone else who called me to tune it. I tuned it again this week and,
except for not having a C8, it still sounds and plays well for a piano
its age, having gotten that new lease on life. 

As I was tuning, I thought about the plethora of these old uprights
still in service and how averse their owners are to "recycling" them. If
a piano has gotten light playing over the years and the environment was
friendly (like the Pacific coast), the aging wire may be the only thing
needing replacement and why not do what this inventive gentleman had
done where restringing is not a feasibility?

The main challenge, because of the different ways the keys are splayed,
is adapting the capstan of the last key in each section to pick up the
first wippen of the next section. In the above instance, a piece of
thick wire was looped around a screw in the capstan hole and bent to the
right, ending in another loop underneath the next sticker. Lost motion
is adjusted by bending the wire.

Although undetectable by the pianist, it's not the most elegant solution
and I've since devised a way to modify the keys in question to assume
new offset angles. I won't go into the particulars here - it's kind of a
fun puzzle to solve yourself - but thought that list members might be
interested in discussing the concept. I know a great many of these old
untunables should be "pitched" (and a few deserve to be rebuilt) but, as
long as we have parents who buy these thrift-store "bargains" for their
children to learn on, I think there are situations where this idea could
have merit. Comments, please.
 
Tom
-- 
Thomas A. Cole, RPT
Santa Cruz, CA
mailto:tcole@cruzio.com