Puzzler: instant rust

[Ron Nossaman]

>I had a tuning today on a brand new Kawai RX-3 6 foot 2 grand.  The piano 
>has been in the house for maybe 3 months.  It was closed up tight, but 
>when I opened it, I saw that rust was already starting to form on the 
>strings and on some of the pins.  I was shocked, and was at a loss to 
>figure out how this could happen, especially in a house with radiant 
>heating(that's another issue).


Does "closed up tight" mean that the lid is kept down and closed, or down 
and folded back, or open and closed intermittently, with it happening to be 
closed when you saw it?

Were the plain strings under the bass strings rusty? Big clue. If they are, 
it's atmospheric (or spray, etc). If not, it's contact. Like for instance a 
cat that crawls in under the folded back lid to sleep on the strings after 
bathing one side, then rolling wet side down to do the other. I've seen 
this one a couple of times. Then there's damp handed corrosive string 
patters and pluckers. People just can't keep their hands off of piano 
strings - techs included. Watch a group of techs leaning around an open 
piano at a convention or seminar. But at least the techs are aware of 
whether or not their personal body chemistry dissolves music wire and 
discolors copper. That doesn't help the big purple hand prints and strum 
marks on the bass strings in new pianos in showrooms, however. As a 
secondary question, what do dealers do about that, after the fact, since it 
has to make them hard to sell?

Ron N