>Picked up a great tech tip years ago at a convention. Carry a small hand
>towel in your kit. Put on top of your pants when you need to remove an
>action. Helps keep the gunk off the pants.
I have an approach to dirty actions that keeps me and the house clean, makes money, and improves the piano. If an action is coming out of a piano, I think white carpets. Do I really want to scrape the remnants of two generation's musical trash, ( sure to include candy wrappers, pencils, magic markers,old postage stamps, pieces of last years Christmas tree, lesson notes from 20 years ago all held together by cobwebs and dust), onto a floor?
I take an old, white, queen-size sheet and cover everything under the front end of the piano. I plug the vacuum in, get it set with a brush attachment, and put it right next to the keyboard. Then, with somewhere to put it already covered, I can pull the action out while standing and just dump everything on the sheet. It is often a big moment for the customer. (I wrote of one incident to the list in 1996)
It is also an obvious validation of your suggestion that the piano was going to need a minimum of $XX worth of interior cleaning, ( we did mention that before we began digging into this thing, didn't we?). With the action out, the marbles and toys retrieved from the underlevers, I grab that vacuum before the customer leaves, and let them see what clean wood looks like next to the dirtiest part of the keybed.
Lube the contact points and you have provided a very functional service for a good price, and if the customer is looking on, I explain that I am just cleaning the working part of the keyframe. "I had to go in there to fix a pedal squeak, etc. and had this bit of cleaning to reassemble things properly. The rest of the piano could use it, but this was a functional thing, and all the pencil removal was no charge."
The sheet is full of history, they are full of memories,the piano is full of dust...
From there, it is a soft lob over the middle of the plate to sell them a completecleaning to go with it, or on the next service call.
An older an more experienced tuner once told me that "You can make as much money per hour with a vacuum as you can with a tuning hammer". He was right.
Regards,
Ed Foote
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