The recent thread about ripoff tuners and shoddy "rebuilding" reminded me of an appointment I had the other day. Tuned a 1902 6' or so Kimball grand. I had tuned it less than a year ago. When I was done tuning and was playing the keys a little, I noticed that the sustain pedal was working poorly and making lots of groaning noise. I crawled onto the ground and looked about. The lady came in the room and I asked her if she had noticed poor sustain pedal performance. She said that indeed it was miserable. She said that I had "rebuilt" the whole thing down there during our last appointment. I was somewhat taken aback by that. I most certainly had no memory of any "rebuilding" of the sort. Anyway, to make a long story short, the bottom pedal box was falling off one of the two main vertical posts of the lyre, thus making the groan. And after removing the lyre I saw and remembered the extent of my previous lyre "rebuilding" job: Last time, the entire lyre was falling off the keybed because the four screws were stripped - I had CA-glued veneer shims into the enlarged holes and screwed all back together - screws were still very strongly set into their holes. Yup, that was about a $20 complete lyre "rebuilding" job. "Rebuilt".........Arg! Terry Farrell
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC