"maybe I should have been a little more discouraging in my assessment." Good chance that is true. I know when I was new in this business I was reluctant to call a piece of junk a piece of junk. And I'm not a tech who will work only on fine grand pianos - I repair numerous spinets and other rather lowly pianos. So often an old worn-out piano is limping along with nothing broken - so it just keeps on going and the owners don't want to replace it - and I don't force the issue - I'll certainly tell the owner it's junk if they ask, but usually not otherwise. BUT, when an opportunity arises to start balancing out cost of repairs to worth of the piano and performance of the piano I have learned to speak clearly and forcefully. And no opportunity exists better to steer someone away from a piano than a piano that is not yet in their home! And better than that - a piano that is not in their home AND has a cracked plate among other things!!! Time will be a good teacher for you. Eventually you will learn that you need to speak up to stop the bleeding. Some (many - most?) old worn-out pianos are not worth moving from one house to another (maybe to the dump). The thought that makes the most sense to me is when I think of some of the nice little pianos that I've seen people find - a like-new 10-year-old Baldwin console for $900, an excellent condition 15-year-old Kimball console for $450 - when you realize there are nice (relatively speaking) little pianos available for cheap, it very quickly makes fixing up an old upright very uneconomical. I find that I can help them reach clarity on the issue when I tell them that they can easily spend $X (hundreds, thousand +) repairing the broken things on this old upright and you will then have a repaired old upright that is worn out and plays poorly. How can you justify that when they can find a clean functioning newer piano for $1K or less. Hope this helps. Terry Farrell ----- Original Message ----- From: Bryn Latta Yes I checked the pins and was surprised at how nice they felt. I sent the lady an estimate for a variety of things, I suggested that to get the piano working well she would need new strings, repair of a cracked bass bridge, new hammers, damper felts, bushings etc. And I gave her a price. But there was not a single thing broken or not functioning in the action and the board, with minimal crown, still had a nice tone when I thumped the bridge. So she will probably never get all this work done and it's probably not worth doing... maybe I should have been a little more discouraging in my assessment. To be honest it was the first time I'd done an assessment of this kind of piano, although I learned about it in school. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090605/c583f369/attachment.htm>
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