belated response to "Undesired business"

[David Nereson]

    Thanks for the suggestions.  (Was very busy last few days and couldn't respond til now).  
    You gotta be careful what pianos you agree to tune in the first place, or you get stuck with pianos you don't necessarily want to service year after year.  Once you've tuned the thing a time or two, they wonder why all the sudden it's not good enough for you.  I "inherited" the client from a colleague who was ill, and tuned it twice while "covering" for him, but now that I've seen the condition of the piano, I wish I'd turned it down in the first place.    
    It's a 1917 Steinway 6'4" reproducer with the player mechanism removed.  Nicely refinished, but has had the automotive valve spring thing done to the soundboard in an attempt to restore crown.  You don't always notice these things until you have to crawl under there for some other reason.  
    Somebody did a poor job of replacing keytops, which necessitated my rebushing the keys to keep them from clattering and rattling against each other.  Should've investigated further before even agreeing to do that because once I got the action to my shop and saw the keys, I couldn't believe the butchering that had taken place.  
    I took a lot of photos I'd like to post, but they're too huge for e-mail and I'm not sure how to reduce them in size.  They can't be reduced too far, or the details aren't visible.  But it would be interesting to some of you, just to speculate as to why someone went to all the trouble to shim, splint, cut, alter, scarf, drill, fill, graft, and otherwise butcher this set of keys.   
    On Steinway reproducers, besides the keyslip, key blocks, and fallboard, you have to lie on your back under the keybed and unscrew a block of wood related to the una corda pedal just to remove the action.  On this piano, one of the screws for that block is inaccessible unless you also remove the lyre first, and it's no trivial matter getting the lyre back on, that is, holding the heavy thing up in position with one hand while trying to get a machine screw threaded into a cast iron flange under the keybed.  So, just pulling and replacing the action means 20 minutes of one's time.  And of course she has the piano back in a corner with almost no clearance between the keyboard and the wall, with the bench, a lamp, an armchair, and a corner of the fireplace in the way.  It's not a light piano to just pull back a couple feet without having to move a huge potted plant.  And of course the casters don't want to roll from the floor up onto the rug without buckling the rug.  Make that at least a half hour of one's time just to pull the action and put the piano back where it was.  
    In my opinion, it can't be properly regulated and voiced without massive replacement or much repinning of action parts, and really it should have a new set of keys made for it, but the cost wouldn't be justified since the soundboard's been "valve springed."  Yet she likes the thing and probably wonders why I can't work wonders, since the last guy never complained about it.
    Yeah, maybe the thing to say is, "Well, it would take $35K to put things right."
    --David Nereson, RPT
     
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