SPOOKY piano

[BSimon1234@AOL.COM]

This may or not be related to humidity, I never did find out.

A couple of years ago, I went to a home and pitch raised their console 25
cents, to A440,  broke a bass string and came back within a few weeks and
found it 35-40 cents high. Lowered everything quickly, tuned to A440,
installed string. Came back in a week to touch up the string and the entire
piano was very low in pitch, perhaps 20-25 cts.  I started checking my SOT
against the telephone dial tone at the beginning of each tuning, thinking I
was tuning to a bad standard, but I was not. ( in our area there is a square
wave 440 cycle tone for the dial tone) Of course, since I had tuned it
recently, all these extra tunings were free, and why wouldn't they be?

Every time I saw this piano, it was really off in who knows what direction, I
finally passed on it, just gave up and would not go back. Perhaps someone was
learning tuning, or some structural thing was going on, but I could not think
of, or find, anything structural that would cause the piano to go sharp
sometimes, flat other times, back and forth. I meant to bridge a few tuning
pin tops with a glued hair, James Bond detective agency stuff,  but forgot
until after I left.

It was certainly a "failure" for me, but it was darn spooky, and I never did
figure out a solution. It is the only piano I have ever worked on that did not
react as it was supposed to.

I would like to hear ANY ideas of what might have happened.

Thanks 
Bill Simon

P.S. - Incidentally, I have on one or two occasions, with the piano of a
musician, left a trap of a hair glued across the tuning pins of the A3, A4, A5
and found them to be gone when I returned again to tune the next time. They
might have been disturbed in cleaning, so now if I am curious about an amateur
tuning the piano, I leave a small drop of white glue on two or three pins, and
the tuning hammer leaves a mark or knocks them off. 

Hey, - piano tuning can be  dull. One has to do something to liven it up!