[pianotech] depressing rebuilds

[Ron Nossaman]

"How was it?", he asked as I was making out the bill for the 
tuning. "Well", I said, "I've seen worse rebuilds, but this is 
certainly a contender". A small stencil grand, with "Hamilton" 
on the fall board, in a small town church. They decided it 
needed tuned when they gave up trying to find the source of 
the buzz coming from the tail area when they played D#-3. The 
buzz took a minute or so, proving to be about an 8mm clear 
glass sphere (Gypsy fortune teller mice?) sitting on the 
soundboard at the low end of the tenor bridge. So much for the 
reason for the service call. Then I tuned it. I made a mental 
checklist as I looked it over during the tuning. Bright copper 
plate color, agraffes painted too. Delignit block with at 
least 4/0 pins, very erratic torque throughout. Nasty sounding 
low tenor and killer octave. The plate had been lowered to 
produce bearing on the concave soundboard. Epoxy (?) goobered 
into a badly split up treble bridge cap, no attempt made to 
clean up the notching, but the bridge pins were new and filed 
nice and sharp on top. New keytops, overhanging all around, 
with lots of slop in the original (I hope) bushings. New 
hammers, and an action so badly out of regulation I'd call it 
unplayable. The dampers also, naturally, worked very poorly.

He didn't know who had done the (what looked like very recent) 
work, as the piano was a donation. Surprise! That just likely 
means the owner got burned on a lousy rebuild and dumped it on 
the church for the write off.

I didn't leave a card in the piano.
Ron N