An interesting afternoon tearing this Knabe down. Watching the tuning pins come out, I got to wondering why there looked like different sizes, and mic'd some of them. I have 2/0 at 2-1/4, 4/0, at 2-1/4 and 2-3/8, 5/0 at 2-1/4, 2-3/8, and 2-1/2, and 6/0 at 2-3/8. I've likely missed a couple of lengths of 3/0 there somewhere as well, since I didn't mic the whole set. If there was ever an "Always Replace the Block" poster child, this is the very guy. Poor thing. Also, I wish I'd had one of the "Throw a few more twists on the bass strings, to revitalize the suckers folks" here to disarm some of the bear traps I ran into. Nearly lost an arm on a couple of them, and had to pry more than a dozen up off the hitch with a screwdriver. For the record - they weren't revitalized. The bass sounded universally, if not uniformly wretched. And if you looked up killer octave, you might have found mention of this piano as a definitive example. One of the more dramatic cases I've heard. That, of course, wasn't the result of past creative maintenance, rather the built in self destruct - like the bridge caps, but was impressive enough to merit mention. While I was whacking on the thing prior to tear down, my wife came out from the house to complain about the tone. The current owner has had the piano for maybe twenty years. The player was dead when he bought it, and the piano has had nearly nothing done to it since he bought it, so it's been like this for a very long time. He's looking forward to hearing it play again. Me too. Ron N
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC