Plastic (old) elbow dilemma

[Susan Kline]

At 11:00 PM 10/18/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>Dear list,  Perhaps some of you could give some advice on my situation. 
>Recently a customer called and said some of her notes were broken.  After 
>asking a few questions, I realized that she had an old spinet with the 
>disentegrating elbow syndrome.  I explained to her that fixing a few would 
>just be a stop gap remedy and she might in fact be better off with another 
>piano.  As fate would have it, its a ? family heirloom (lame) and yet she 
>just wants the broken ones fixed and the piano tuned.  I plan on tuning the 
>piano first and fear that I will break many more.  She does not want to 
>replace them all at this point.  I feel like I might be getting into a mess 
>of a situation here. Perhaps I should cancel unless she wants to spring
for a 
>complete replacement.  And even then the other plastic, if any, may soon 
>start crumbling.  So what do you fellows do in a situation such as this?  
>Thanks in advance. Jim Love /PTG Associate/Midland, Tx.

I warn her several times, strongly enough that she can't conveniently forget; 
I make sure that the ones I replace don't look anything like the old ones 
(usually not a problem) so when the next ones break she can't tell me it 
was the ones I replaced; then I go ahead. Sometimes they can hang on quite 
well, oddly enough. Just tune normally. I suspect you won't find them 
breaking, and if you do, it's no harder to replace them when you're there 
rather than later on. 

Of course, if your appointment book is full for the next two months, you can 
refer her to someone else if you don't want to deal with this sort of piano 
and customer. I usually don't mind, so long as I have more interesting work 
as well. 

Susan