You can decide up an outdated antique piano for $four hundred. I know, since I just offered a single. But how do you know if it’s value acquiring at all? Will it be repairable and will it be Alright for your little one to learn on? You want to know what to seem for.
The wrest plank and tuning pins of my Moore & Moore upright piano all appeared outstanding. It was 1 of the best I’d at any time observed in that respect–there was no proof of destroyed or abused pins, they all seemed authentic, none had been hammered in, none had marks on them, they ended up not bent and there have been no indicators of cracks or other injury to the wrest plank. The seem board (the premier piece of wood, behind the strings in the centre of the instrument) experienced no cracks both, and the strings all appeared good. The action (the transferring parts) labored nicely on all the notes, and the dampers stopped the sound of each note when you lifted the crucial or lifted the damper pedal. There was 1 missing plastic key, but that would be simple to change. Most outdated pianos would not look so excellent on the within.
Then, piano movers london of weeks afterwards I obtained a complaint from the extremely disappointed consumer:
“Hello Margaret. Following we had the piano sent we obtained a piano tuner out and ended up genuinely unhappy…it was unable to be tuned…when the tuner tried to tighten the pins they would unwind straight absent and she mentioned it was no very good at all…so we have hired a piano. When the guys came out to produce the [new] piano they also said “No, that’s cactus…”
But the piano was really really tunable, and the inside workings had been in very great problem. At some point, following far more advice from me, the purchaser realised he’d identified a very usable instrument.
The skill of the tuner is paramount to maintaining the strings and tuning pins ‘on pitch.’ When living in the remote city of Karratha, I taught myself to tune a quite previous piano in considerably worse condition than this. I also did some tunings on a couple of my students’ previous pianos. In all circumstances it was really hard to maintain them in tune for more than a handful of minutes, partly thanks to my very poor approach with the tuning hammer (lever). Even so, when a skilled tuner came to city he did a marvelous work and the a few rickety aged pianos stayed nicely in tune for a lot of months.
When a piano has not been tuned for some years it might demand a lot more than one particular tuning to ‘come up to pitch.’ It really is not possible to know how effectively this is heading to pan out, you can only consider it and see how numerous tunings it demands. The strings have tonnes of tension and you have to hold out for the pressure to even out prior to doing an additional tuning. It can just take months prior to the tuning settles.
When he acquired my Moore & Moore piano I told him it required re-hydrating (it needed a lot more h2o or humidity in the wooden). If the wrest plank had dried out the pins would surely be loose. In Karratha we re-hydrated all a few old pianos and it manufactured a Huge distinction. The basic treatment is to location a beaker of h2o within the piano at the bottom. The greater, the greater, simply because men and women have a tendency to forget about them and they eventually operate out of h2o. It takes weeks to have an influence. This re-hydrating also seemed to fix an motion dilemma that two of our pianos experienced. Some tuners don’t like drinking water beakers, they reckon they will result in problems with the motion or rust the strings so skilled suggestions should be sought from a skilled technician, but it worked well for us. There are commercially-offered humidifiers/de-humidifiers specifically produced for pianos.
Yet another cheap strategy to aid with the tuning is to hammer the pins into the wrest plank. It really is a normal treatment but you will find a restrict to how significantly and how typically the pins can be hammered in. The pins on this old piano seemed like they’d never ever been hammered at all, so that was nevertheless a viable option. It’s absolutely a occupation for a expert piano technician, to keep away from harm to the pins or wrest plank.
A significantly far more expensive technique is to exchange the pins with more substantial pins (they occur in various measurements), but it would be a huge undertaking and it would be less expensive to get another piano.