Decker Bros. Upright

[Terry Beckingham]

Hi Gang,

I have a customer who just inherited an old Decker Bros. upright serial no. 
12557. According to Pierce Atlas it was built between 1875 and 1880. It is 
in surprisingly good condition. It is about 35-40 cents flat.
Can anyone tell me if it was designed to be tuned at A435 or A440?

When I opened up the piano today, I immediately noticed that about half of 
the iron wound bass strings had been replaced with newer copper wound 
strings. This set off alarm bells in my head. I set my RCT for no overpull 
and started to raise the pitch to A440. I only got as far as G#1, a single 
wound unison and the string broke. I quit right there. About half of the 
bass strings up from there had been replaced and half were originals. It 
appears that all of the unwound music wire is original, but I wasn't 
willing to take the chance of having more strings break.

I haven't spoken to the customer yet (she was at work), but I don't know 
how to proceed. She just spent several hundred dollars moving this 
instrument up from her parents home in the south. I know she will want me 
to attempt some sort of repairs. At a bare minimum, I think it should be 
restrung complete with new bass strings and repinned.  Torque on the few 
pins that I checked is only 30-50 inch pounds. I temporarily replaced the 
broken string with a universal bass string. I only turned out the pin 1 
turn, but it was too loose to hold. I removed it to replace it with a 
larger pin. Only problem was that the original pin was a 2/0 only 2 inches 
long. The new 3/0 pin bottomed out in the hole.

I didn't check the board for crown or the bridges for bearing. The board 
has 3 long cracks, but no rib separation as yet. There are no cracks at all 
in any of the 3 bridges. This piano has two bass bridges. The lower one for 
the single unisons is placed as normal, but the bridge for the double 
unisons is at almost a right angle from the other  bass bridge.

The piano has original hammers and keytops which are in fairly good 
condition. There are no broken parts and the action isn't even all that 
badly out of regulation. I understand that the piano was fairly well 
maintained until about 5 years ago.

Any suggestions? I should probably just walk away from it, but then I will 
have an unhappy customer. I'm the only person for several hundred miles 
around who does any of this type of work.

Thanks

Terry Beckingham