NoteWorthy Pianos

A new client in Nashville called looking to sell her 5'10" Kawai grand piano! She was interested in having it spruced up before listing it, so I came out to give it a good cleaning. After resurfacing the hammers, shining the strings, and tuning, the piano looks and sounds great! The most interesting part is the piano was signed by three award-winning musicians: George Duke, Isaac Hayes, and Marvin Hamlisch. Hamlisch is the most interesting to me as he is one of only two PETOG (Pulitzer, Emmy, Tony, Oscar, Grammy) winners. I always enjoy finding fascinating history attached to pianos, it's one of my favorite parts of the job!

In the world of piano technology, little measurements can make huge differences. While rebushing the keys for my 1904 Mason and Hamlin upright, I realized that my normal rebushing cauls (used to clamp the new felt into the mortise while the glue sets) were too large... front to back. Normally, mortise sizes can vary, with the most common being either a gap of .125", .137", or .146" left to right, and I have different caul sizes for those types of keys. This piano is unique in that the mortise was .146", but the gap length was .03" smaller than usual, so my cauls just barely wouldn't fit. Since the key buttons (which contain the mortises) were in good shape, I chose not to replace them with new ones, which would give me a bigger hole, but rather decided to order new custom cauls for this piano, and any future pianos that have this issue.

The new cauls worked great, but I had a new problem: the cloth I use for rebushing was ALSO too thick! I love any excuse to pull out my guillotine felt cutter, and I used it to slim down my bushing cloth, so that finally, I was able to finish this custom key bushing job. I still have to wait for more supplies to come in so I can finish cutting new felt for the capstans, but it's one step closer to being a new piano!

Last week I finished up my father-in-law's hammer replacement job, and it looks fantastic! After a little bit of voicing and a lot of regulation, the piano feels and sounds so much better. He's a professional musician and bought his Yamaha GH1 back in the 80s, and you can really see how much he played those hammers; the new ones are so much larger and heavier, with a fuller sound and a much more "grand" feel! The extra weight makes the action feel almost twice as heavy as it did before, and now it feels just right. It was very fun to align the hammers and a great experience!

Tuning season is slowing down as summer vacation begins, so I'm taking my extra time to work on a few projects at home! My Mason and Hamlin upright has some very unique keys, in that they don't have modern capstans, but instead have adjustable screws covered by felt. Unfortunately for it, that felt is 121 years old and already had some extra felt added to it to account for the compression. I decided to have an arts and crafts day to cut new felt (gluing and weighing down with regulating key weights) for all the keys, which will make it feel fresh and new!

The Knabe blog post I promised back in December is finally here!

https://www.noteworthypianos.com/post/1912-knabe-grand

1912 Knabe Grand For a long time, I've had a few pianos listed for sale on my website, though they have all been in various stages of rebuilding and repair. With how busy life can move, it's hard to find time to fix pianos at home, especially when the business has been growing so rapidly! Last year I acquired anothe...

Last month I reinstalled a pedal for a recording tech, which was a fun job! It had broken in two during a move years ago, and my brother-in-law was able to weld it back together - it works great now! Unfortunately, the pedal only came out of the piano because it was in two pieces, but to get it back in required tilting the piano to access the bottom board, remove it, and install the pedal from underneath. His antique piano now has all three pedals functioning!

I recently helped transfer a piano from a client who was selling her house to a church that was in need of a better piano. This Kimball grand is much newer, more reliable and more repairable than their previous Starr grand, but it does need some work before it's fully ready to be played. I'm working hard this week to get it finished and reinstalled before Easter!