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No passaran,mice
http://youtu.be/uYHLk0j1fLs

With the help of two younger backs...

We moved five pianos:
one Yamaha console involving travel of 70 miles,
one Yamaha P-22,
then travel of another 40 miles to get back to my town,
in a church one Cable studio down two flights of stairs and down a hall to a class room,
one new Boston studio back up those same two flights to be put into its new home in the choir room,
deliver my garden tiller to the shop,
then picked up my mother-in-law's gift of her old lawn tractor and took to my shop (18 miles),
then travelled an 85-mile round trip to move a Kimball grand from one home in the middle of nowhere to another home in the middle of nowhere.

Now I am home, thankful, safe, and glad for younger backs!

Did some plumbing last weekend and retrieved the thermostat from old electrical geyser. Wired this into my hot hide glue setup. No more manual switching and watching the candy thermometer.

Tuned in a church today that had a Hammond B3 and 2 Leslies that looked as if it had just came from the showroom floor. Its an Apostolic (fundamentalist) church and the Leslies were turned up all the way to 11.

Hi Phil,

regarding the need for younger backs, have you or anybody else seen these piano stair climber robots in action?




There is a piano rental company in Helsinki, Finland, using one of these for transports. Amazing engineering, to say the least.

I hate the idea of a grand piano going upstairs keyboard end up! Other than that, it looks like a better solution than others I have seen touted.

Patrick


That is simply superb! The built-in swivel, load shift, load leveling features are excellently thought out.

My path often crosses with piano moving crews. They have machines like this one that they rarely get to use.

They have a tendency to chew up carpeted stairways and even on stone staircases it's not worth the risk of expensive damage. Many buildings here are listed.

Among other things, I hit the 1000 post mark on Piano World.

Today I worked on an old Thiebes-Sterlin Upright from 1910. Of course it was over a step flat and had several keys sticking. The customer wanted it up to A-440 due to the fact that she was starting lessons with her son. I saw that there were already five broken strings in the treble and I think it was a 3/4 plate. There was a note from a previous tech that back in 1985 it had been tuned a step flat, however there was another note that back in 1949 it was in fact tuned to A-440. I warned her of the risks of pulling it up to A-440, she thought about it and said, "Ok, let's go for it." Only three more strings broke during the pitch raise. I replaced all eight of the broken strings, cleaned out all of the junk that was causing several keys to stick, among which was a large metal yard stick. I adjusted the lost motion, reinstalled the rods for the soft pedal which had been in the bottom of the piano for years, realigned a few hammer springs, fixed a bridal strap and adjusted a few of the back checks. 4 1/2 hours later she ended up sounding pretty good! The customer was VERY happy! Sometimes the old "clunkers" are the most satisfying to work on because the transformation is so dramatic, but man, am I tired though! :-)

Yesterday I serviced a piano that was one of the very first I ever worked on. It was for a friend of mine who is a retired choir teacher. When I first started out she let me come and tune her piano just for the practice. It's an early Acrosonic. It needed a large pitch raise and of course a string broke. It was the first string that I ever had to replace. Every year when I service this piano, I would always look at that broken string and think what a crummy job I did. The coils were terrible. So today I finally fixed it. It now has nice neat coils. It's rewarding to see the progress I've made as a piano technician.

Today, I've been awake since 3 a.m. Couldn't sleep with the sound of heavy rain. We received 5 inches of rain here overnight. No flooding at my house, but major and ongoing flooding to many of the towns and villages I service in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York. This is the second "100 year flood" in 7 years...the last coming on this same day in 2006.

I had an intriguing piano to tune today.

A church I tune for received a moderately competently rebuilt 1906 Weber 9ft concert grand, and they decided to install it as their sanctuary piano, replacing a 1989 Y-C with extremely jumpy pins (kinda glad to see that one demoted...).









This is first I had seen one of these, and was struck by the four-string unisons in the upper two treble sections, along with the exposed pin block (I thought that was a 19th century thing). The hammer strike all four strings in the four-string unisons.

Anything special about these pianos?

Hello, 4 strings unison was a Beethoven (absent in typing corrector) idea.

Did you notice the imbalance of the 3 strings unison miss, and the tone is more "square", straight?

Isaac, yes, it was quite as you describe it. But, since it was sounding like that, I decided to apply that well-known UT, SGET VII, to the piano.

Sounds totally alive now...

Is the tone "square" because of the tail?

It's quite an attractive beast. Sound good?

Totally early 20th century thing, too! The questions are--when did the idea of the exposed pin block cease? Who was the first to cease? What reasons did they give for ceasing? And, who was the last to cease?

(I'm sure I don't know.)

I'm with Marty--how does it sound?

I am not sure if an idea can "cease".

There are in fact real advantages to exposed pin blocks. As far as I know, Bösendorfer is still making pianos with exposed pin blocks today.

Marty and Andy, it could sound better, IMO. It has a metallic quality.

It needs some serious regulation, and probably resurfacing/voicing. The dip feels too shallow, no aftertouch, and some bobbling hammers.