[pianotech] depressing rebuilds

Ryan Sowers tunerryan at gmail.com
Sat Jun 6 16:13:43 MDT 2009


You are always supposed to leave your competitor's card in these pianos!

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Ron Nossaman <rnossaman at cox.net> wrote:

>
> "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
>



-- 
Ryan Sowers, RPT
Puget Sound Chapter
Olympia, WA
www.pianova.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090606/41388941/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the pianotech mailing list

This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC