I saw the oldest Yamaha I've ever known today. It was at a restaurant who's owner bought it sight-unseen off Craigslist for $1,800. Obviously a very stupid idea. Generally speaking it was a wreck. Very dirty, cracked sound board, weak pin block, rusty strings, some stripped screws, action problems, and so on. What makes it interesting is that it was serial number 32912. That would place it at the very end of 1940. Since the Pearl Harbor attack occurred on December 17th this would indicate it was one of the very last pianos that Yamaha built before the factory was converted into war time use. It had the old Nippon-Gakki name and "Empire No. 1" was cast into the plate which was apparently the model. No agraffs at all in the scale. The name Yamaha was cast into the action brackets in a strange curvy font. Someone had applied a Yamaha decal onto the fall board but you could clearly still see the name "Empire" below it because they didn't remove the original. I'm sure if this piano could talk it would have many stories to tell. It survived the war and somehow ended up being brought to the United States. Anyone else see one like this? Rob Goodale, RPT Las Vegas, NV -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091124/06467016/attachment.htm>
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