<HTML>List, I got lucky today, I guess.  No broken strings. When I arrived at the elementary school where my day's most interesting = tuning was to take place, I found a really beautiful, monstrously large Kran= ich and Bach upright, circa 1903.  It had beautifully maintained flame = mahagony case. Expected to be a rehearsal piano for the California Youth Sym= phony, it rested in the multi-purpose room of the school, 15-20 cents flat i= n the bass, 20-30 cents in the mid, and 25-45 cents flat in the high treble.=   I was left alone with this beast.  The gentleman who had contracted= me was elsewhere, and the principal of the school was just happy that a pia= no had been donated to him by parents in what is probably one of the wealthi= est communities in the country at a time when music is taking a distant back= seat .   I measured the pitch, and groaned.  To pitch raise, or not to pitch= raise, that was the question.  Common sense would have told me to a) &= nbsp;leave    b) tune the piano to a lower pitch.  My co= ntact had said that I should go ahead and do repairs as long as they were wi= thin reason, so my thought was that broken strings in an attempt at pitch ra= ising were certainly acceptable at this point, given that the piano was to b= e used in orchestral rehearsals. As I Pro-Teked all the string bends, v-bars, pressure bars, I took note = of all of the features this piano had to offer.  Great fold-down music = rack!  Patented 1883.  The plate lists each and every patent uniqu= e to this Kranich and Bach.  Some of them were really interesting, many= of them seemingly pointless overbuild just to be different.  At least = there were no brass flanges. I was actually able to pitch raise it and only had major adrenaline rush= es on the 3 pins that popped.  The rest of it went well with the help o= f TuneLab Pocket.  I "fine" tuned it, and it came out reasonably well.T= he false beats in the upper end were a bit gnarly, but the piano ended up at= A440.  The tone was rich and warm in a way that is unique to old uprig= hts. Ahhh, the day went remarkably better after that was done. Dave Stahl I  </HTML>