I had a new client call me a few weeks ago to schedule an appointment. Over the phone she said she needed a pitch raise, tuning, and a string replaced. I gave her my rates and we set the appointment which was today. The piano is a 1916 Lyon & Healy Player Upright. The history she gave me was that she bought for about $4,000 from a private owner who had supposedly restored it in 2001. When she said it was restored I was NOT expecting what I discovered. First, with most every new client, I check the pitch of the piano with my ETD. A-440 was 7 cents sharp. In fact, most of the tenor/treble was between 4 to 12 cents sharp. I checked the pitch in the bass, and we're talking 20-35 cents flat. When I looked inside the piano, I noticed right away a disarray of things. In fact most of the tuning pins in the bass were not consistent with one another in regards to their height. There were some pins that looked dangerously too far out of the block. The coils were sloppy, not tight, and most of the coil bottoms were about 1/4'' from their bushings. There was one string replaced in the bass, and a poor job was done at that. And there is big evidence of pinblock dope as well. Moving up to the tenor/treble, some of the coils were actually touching the plate. The entire inch lbs of torque in the entire piano by the way, was at best 40. There were a few in the bass that had less. In fact, one note measured two notes lower on my ETD. As I looked in the piano, I kept asking myself what this gentlemen did by "restoring" the piano. All of the parts with the exception of the one shiny new bass string looked original. I asked my client about the player, and she said it works....sometimes. I also asked her about the broken string (which I opted out of replacing due to the player mechanism). She said it broke when the movers moved it in the house. Anyway, she paid $4,000 for it when she bought it, and had it recently appraised for insurance purposes, and said it was worth about $10,000. Oh, and by the way, the outside finish of the piano is absolutely beautiful! That's my story for the day. Merry Christmas! TODD PIANO WORKS Matthew Todd, Piano Technician (979) 248-9578 http://www.toddpianoworks.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20081220/2e26b84d/attachment-0001.html>
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