Alan Meyer is at PianoDisc this week getting official training for installations. (Actually we have been doing installations together for a long time but he always felt like he wanted to make it official). Alan is the tech for several Hotels on the strip and when he is gone I take over for him. This week I had two gigs at Paris, two at the Regents, and two at MGM. The typical scenario: Move the piano out of storage, push it into the facility, (i.e. ball room, conference/convention center, etc.), set it up and then tune it. Then you return at the end of the gig, (four or five hours typically), break down the piano and return it to storage. The pianos are all very light weight grands, (GE-1, etc.), no serious strain for a single tech to roll over off a dolly. The dollies used have two swivel wheels and two fixed wheels. This makes it easy for one tech to steer a piano around. The skid remains on the dolly at all times and with the two fixed wheels at the front the dolly doesn't move when rolling it over. (Trust me, this works VERY well no matter how scary it may sound). At my last MGM gig I had to push the piano up onto a riser about a foot high. We have an aluminum ramp on wheels for this job which works pretty well. It will get you huffin' pushing it up but it is still pretty straight forward. At this particular gig I pushed the piano up as usual, tilted it over and got it set up, ran over the tuning, and then headed out to work on a private clients broken PianoDisc system. About four hours later I arrived back to reverse the process. I rolled the piano onto the skid. No problems. I removed the lyre & legs, tightened down the strap, and lined the piano up for a straight shoot down the ramp. With the wheels pointing the right direction, I proceeded to make my journey down the ramp with the piano. This is usually the easy part since gravity is working for you. All you need to do is push it back a bit to control the speed. So far so good. Almost down now... the wheels are moving off the bottom of the ramp.... Suddenly Things began to feel out of control. I looked down and saw that one of the swivel casters was rotating around in wild and illogical directions. The dolly begins to wander sideways as the wheel jumps the bottom of the ramp.... I hear my self say something not normally acceptable in respected company. The piano teeters and with a very interesting sound the whole thing proceeds to fold over onto the floor, lid side down!!! I loose my balance and topple onto the floor with it trying to stabilize the thing. Somehow I end up on my back about 15 feet away. A deafening silence fills the room as the 20 or so caterer's and another dozen straggling party goers turn to see what I'm sure was quite a memorable scene. Fortunately I was able to jump back up without injury and a couple of the servers helped me right the piano again and reset the dolly. No significant damage seems to have happened to the piano. I noticed that the keys shifted off their front rail pins but that is easily remedied. A thick moving cover was on at the time and the room is well carpeted so I'm sure any cosmetic damage was very limited. So what when wrong? I took a close look at the dolly and the wheel that had a mind of it's own. A significantly large chunk of rubber has torn out of the wheel and is missing. An 1/8th of an inch or so remaining portion was all that was keeping the wheel shaped round. So the moral of the story... Check your moving equipment regularly. If the wheels are damaged, if there are missing caster bolts, loose glue joints, cracks, sticking swivels, weak or deteriorating skid boards, frayed or questionable straps, whatever the case may be, your asking for trouble. This time it was just a little beat up GE-1 hotel piano. Next time it could be something much nicer and heavier!!! Now I get to tell Alan about it when he gets back tomorrow!! Rob Goodale, RPT Las Vegas, NV
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