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I had 2 pin treatments this week. When pins won’t hold the tension of the string(s), the piano won’t stay in tune. There’s many solutions to loose pins, but one of the newest is to saturate the pin bushing with Cyanoacrylate (CA) Glue. Also known as Super Glue, the CA Glue wicks down through the wood surrounding the pin, swelling the wood, and then hardening. On vertical pianos, you need to tilt the piano onto it’s back, so the CA Glue will wick down around the pin. A piano tilter makes this job tremendously easier.

Left Pic – Piano tilted back
Right Pic – I use the fan to draw the fumes from the CA Glue away. The fumes tend to be hard on the eyes.

Left Pic – Piano Tilter
Right Pic – Piano Tilter in position

Left Pic – Piano tilted back
Right Pic – Treating the pins

This is an early 1900’s upright, that I’ve been working on for a client. Mice had inhabited the piano for an extended length of time. (See further down the page for the cleanup pics) The mice also ate all of the bridal straps, along with some other things. In the pics below I’m removing the remnants of the old straps and replacing with new ones.

Went to a piano tuning before Christmas, but when I got there, they had more than just a piano tuning problem. I removed the action, and brought it home to my shop to do the repair work.(Much easier than working on the living room floor)

Left Pic – Broken damper spring
Right Pic – Damper flange removed, broken spring removed, new spring ready

Left Pic – New spring installed
Right Pic – Damper flange back on damper

Left Pic – Broken Bridle Strap
Right Pic – Bridle Strap Replaced

Left Pic – More Broken Bridle Straps
Right Pic – Replacing bridle strap with bridle strap tool

Left Pic – Bridle Straps Replaced
Right Pic – All Done

In early September 2011, I received a frantic call from the Tour Manager of the Bill Gaither Homecoming Tour asking if I could come tune their stage piano that day. Fortunately I had my tuning stuff with me, so I headed on over. I was also taking my mother-in-law to the concert later that night, so I was able to see and hear the piano in action.

Left & Right Pic – Tuning Gaither Homecoming Tour Yamaha Grand on stage

Left Pic – Bill Gaither with his piano player Gordon Mote
Right Pic – Bill Gaither playing the piano

Left Pic – Gordon Mote playing the piano

Got a call from a private club, saying they needed their piano tuned, but also that they had a Bb key that wasn’t working. When I arrived, the Bb below Middle C had “broken”, or more accurately “split”. Someone either had played the key too hard, or something could have fallen on the key at some point. The split was pretty clean, so gluing was no problem.

Left Pic – Broken (split) Bb Key
Right Pic – About to glue…(I carry a few pieces of cardboard to use as a work surface)

Left Pic – Glued and Clamped
Right Pic – All done…I glued and clamped the key when I first arrived, then proceeded to tune the piano. By the time I had finished the tuning, the glue had set adequately, so I was able to put the key back into place. The piano wasn’t going to be played for several days, so the glue had plenty of time to cure.

Left Pic – Broken Damper Flange w/new replacement
Right Pic – Installing new Damper Flange

Left Pic – Still needs some adjustment
Right Pic – Installed and ready to go

Left Pic – Broken Bridle Straps
Right Pic – Replacing Clip-Style Bridle Strap with specialized bridle strap tool

Left Pic – The action needed some significant damper adjustment. I’m using a homemade support jig to hold the action in playing position so I have access to both sides of the action, and don’t have to worry about the action falling over.

Left Pic – 1922 Steinway Upright in a local church
Right Pic – Notice the Tuner’s dates(a bit hard to see)

Left Pic – More Tuner’s Dates….kind of humbling to work on a piano of this age and stature and seeing the dates in which it was worked on previously….notice the second date in this picture….a month before Pearl Harbor
Right Pic – Tuning

Left Pic – Piano had some action problems, so I had to remove the action
Right Pic – Action removed

Left Pic – Action sitting in my shop
Right Pic – Bridle Straps are broken, causing hammers to fall

Left Pic – Kids with a stick…..not good for Piano Keys
Right Pic – Partially removed chipped key top

Left Pic – Removing the rest of the key top
Right Pic – the “Remnants”

Left Pic – “Whoops” in removing key tops – will be glued back down
Right Pic – Gluing the “whoops”

Left Pic – New key tops
Right Pic – Matched and ready for gluing

Left Pic – Clamped
Right Pic – Key tops done – ready for trimming

Left Pic – Don’t drop a key after it’s done…..had to re-do this one
Right Pic – Trimming

Keys replaced – Client knew the color would be somewhat different, and was ok with that…looks worse in the picture…. in the home, the color is much closer

Family of mice lived in this piano for several years. As you will see mice can do an extreme amount of damage to a piano.

Left Pic – Piano in the original location
Right Pic – Piano in my driveway, where I’m working on the “stuff”

Left Pic – Mouse nest sitting dead center
Right Pic – So much “stuff” got between the keys, that they barely moved

Left Pic – Tuning Notation…May of 1916……in Portland Oregon……WOW!
Right Pic – The “aftermath”…..under the keys

Left Pic – The “gnawing” 
Right Pic – More of the “aftermath”

Left Pic – Keys out and vacuumed
Right Pic – Keys cleaned and lined up

More pics to come, as I continue….

Spent the day at the client’s home, finishing the project

Left Pic – Action pulled, hammer mechanism removed…ready for white keys
Right Pic – White keys installed, hammer mech. back in place, ready to go back in….(several hours later)

Left Pic – Two of the damper flanges had broken free
Right Pic – Here’s the two flanges…the view your looking at is where the action(pictured above) normally resides…basically we’re deep inside the piano

Left Pic – Gluing the 1st flange…as you can see, there’s minimal access to this area…the wood block in the foreground is the right side cheek block(block of wood that normally sits to the right of the highest C key…the metal rod is a screwdriver blade, holding the “glued” section down
Right Pic – Slightly different view with my hammer weighting down the screwdriver blade…I’ll admit this is a bit of a Rube-Goldberg, but it worked…had to do this twice, once for each flange

Left Pic – Piano Life Saver System installed…this is a shot from the floor looking up at the bottom of the grand…black box in the upper right is the water tank for the humidification system…smaller black box (with plugs/cords) is the control unit…you can see the two black tubular de-humidification heater bars, and the curved piece in the lower left is the fill tube for the tank(this isn’t in it’s proper place yet…normally it rides along the curved rim of the piano)
Right Pic – Action installed, everything vacuumed out…ready for the fallboard(key cover), cheek blocks(those blocks at ends of the keyboard), and key slip(long skinny piece that sits in front of the keys)

Left Pic – Tuning and almost done
Right Pic – The coolest piano bench I’ve ever seen…as you lift the seat/lid, the music pocket section rotates up vertically…very neat!