You can select up an old antique piano for $four hundred. I know, due to the fact I just bought a single. But how do you know if it truly is worth buying at all? Will it be repairable and will it be Okay for your kid to find out on? You require to know what to search for.
The wrest plank and tuning pins of my Moore & Moore upright piano all looked excellent. It was one particular of the ideal I might at any time observed in that respect–there was no evidence of ruined or abused pins, they all seemed original, none experienced been hammered in, none had marks on them, they were not bent and there were no symptoms of cracks or other damage to the wrest plank. The seem board (the largest piece of wood, guiding the strings in the centre of the instrument) experienced no cracks possibly, and the strings all looked fine. The motion (the shifting elements) labored properly on all the notes, and the dampers stopped the seem of each notice when you lifted the key or lifted the damper pedal. There was 1 lacking plastic crucial, but that would be simple to replace. Piano disposal london aged pianos would not seem so good on the inside of.
Then, a pair of weeks later on I acquired a criticism from the really let down buyer:
“Hello Margaret. Soon after we experienced the piano shipped we acquired a piano tuner out and were really unhappy…it was unable to be tuned…when the tuner attempted to tighten the pins they would unwind straight absent and she said it was no good at all…so we have hired a piano. When the guys came out to provide the [new] piano they also said “No, that is cactus…”
But the piano was really really tunable, and the inside of workings have been in really excellent problem. At some point, after more tips from me, the consumer realised he’d found a quite usable instrument.
The skill of the tuner is paramount to trying to keep the strings and tuning pins ‘on pitch.’ When dwelling in the remote town of Karratha, I taught myself to tune a extremely aged piano in significantly even worse issue than this. I also did some tunings on a pair of my students’ aged pianos. In all cases it was really difficult to hold them in tune for much more than a couple of minutes, partly thanks to my inadequate method with the tuning hammer (lever). Nevertheless, when a professional tuner came to town he did a wonderful job and the three rickety outdated pianos stayed well in tune for several months.
When a piano has not been tuned for some years it could need much more than a single tuning to ‘come up to pitch.’ It’s not possible to know how effectively this is heading to pan out, you can only try out it and see how several tunings it demands. The strings have tonnes of tension and you have to hold out for the stress to even out prior to performing another tuning. It can get months just before the tuning settles.
When he purchased my Moore & Moore piano I instructed him it essential re-hydrating (it required a lot more water or humidity in the wood). If the wrest plank had dried out the pins would surely be unfastened. In Karratha we re-hydrated all three old pianos and it created a Huge distinction. The straightforward remedy is to area a beaker of drinking water inside the piano at the bottom. The even bigger, the far better, because people are inclined to neglect about them and they sooner or later operate out of water. It normally takes weeks to have an impact. This re-hydrating also seemed to repair an action dilemma that two of our pianos experienced. Some tuners don’t like water beakers, they reckon they will result in problems with the motion or rust the strings so specialist advice ought to be sought from a skilled technician, but it worked nicely for us. There are commercially-offered humidifiers/de-humidifiers specially manufactured for pianos.
One more low cost method to aid with the tuning is to hammer the pins into the wrest plank. It is a standard remedy but there’s a restrict to how much and how often the pins can be hammered in. The pins on this previous piano appeared like they’d never been hammered at all, so that was nevertheless a feasible option. It is absolutely a task for a competent piano technician, to steer clear of injury to the pins or wrest plank.
A much a lot more expensive method is to exchange the pins with larger pins (they appear in distinct measurements), but it would be a big endeavor and it would be cheaper to get another piano.