Right, Dale. The trouble is, if they are here, those great old heavy uprights, I don't want them sent to horrid climates. I want them here, where I get to tune them and work on them ... This isn't completely selfish on my part. I tend to look at many things through "Peak Oil" eyes. At some point, whole-house air conditioning all through the hot muggy season, especially for large houses, might be mostly for very rich people. Just what the Central Valley will be like at that point hardly bears thinking about. There are other architectural styles which can help, like adobe walls three feet thick, and the old Persian building style with long cone-shaped towers which send the hot air out and bring the cool lower air in, but getting such houses built will take time. Most of the well-preserved VERY HEAVY upright gems survived through times before air conditioning, but many through the luck of being brought west or to the high desert before they got funky from 10%-95% humidity swings. I remember one Baldwin grand which a lady had brought from Florida. It had been rebuilt. She was very proud of it. I'm sorry, but that thing was a heap. The soundboard was pathetic, mending and all. She should have left it in Florida. It had already given its all. I remember another good old upright which I really struggled with, against my better judgment. A Packard, I believe. All the wood was dark brown. The leathers on the butts were shriveled into stony lumps because people had first sprayed lubricant (probably WD-40) on the action to fix sluggishness, then doused it with alcohol when the lubricant got gummy. That piano taught me that brushing some vodka onto a shank and then using the hot bending pliers would get the shank to turn (temporarily) to butter and go wherever I wanted instead of crackling and busting. It also showed me that trying to retrieve something that far gone was pretty much a lost cause. This makes it all the more important to hang onto the ones which aren't so far gone. I like your dream, Dale. I think it's possible, given a bit more time. People are starting to understand that the old stuff was the good stuff. It is a matter of bridging the time till their rarity and desirability grow enough for people to put some real money into high-class restoration. This already seems to work for old Steinway uprights, and Mason & Hamlin. Eventually some of the other good brands may follow suit. We just don't want them to have been used as trebuchet ammunition or turned into liquor cabinets in the meantime. Susan Kline On 10/30/2010 7:28 AM, Dale Erwin wrote: > Its true Susan. > Calif/west coast pianos survive beyond the wild imagination of > most. That's another reason that people all over the world want > vintage Calif. Porsche,Mustangs etc. Cause they survive well in the > climate. Pianos anyone? West coast piano finders? ...right here. > Call me or Susan > > > *Dale S. Erwin > www.Erwinspiano.com > * > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Susan Kline <skline at peak.org> > > > On 10/29/2010 9:56 PM, Wim Blees wrote: >> While old Vose pianos were pretty good instruments, and they did have >> some interesting design features, >> from a technician's point of view, in the Midwest, for the most part, >> they're nothing more than an old upright, worth little or nothing to >> the average consumer. > > I see them with different eyes. No doubt average customers here don't > realize what they've got, either. It's still worth holding onto these > pianos in the places where they aren't turned to matchwood by humidity > and temperature swings. If they are in reasonable shape (like here on > the west coast, or in the constant dryness of the high desert) it's > worth trying to keep them around till the day people understand that > they are something special. > > I'm sure the Vose uprights in the Midwest have suffered terrible > damage from the climate, and also from the abundance of old uprights > in the region, which leads people to assume that they are a dime a > dozen. When so many people moved west, they left the old uprights > behind, assuming they'd be easy to acquire in California. Some found > that this wasn't the case, because so many other people had done the > same thing. > > Interesting about the tapered tuning pins, Ron. I've never needed to > tap any. > > John, it's been my experience that really loose pins (which pianos > usually acquired some other place before they were brought to Oregon) > can be made quite usable by carefully putting a few drops of CA glue > on the top of the pin where it enters the pinblock or plate. It wicks > in. I keep a towel under it to catch the drips. Sometimes a second > dose does better than the first one. I theorize that this is because > CA follows cracks so readily that the first application wicks away > from the oversized hole. The second dose relines the hole better, > because the first dose has sealed the cracks. > > Water thin, of course, and not used to excess. I use it only on the > pins which won't hold. Ventilation, of course. It does have "cyano" in > the name. > > Susan Kline -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101030/7569d59b/attachment.htm>
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