Piano Tuner and Technician, Musician, Author, and Bloggist.

Like my father and grandfather before me, I am a Piano Tuner, Technician and Rebuilder, and I have worked in the Piano Industry since 1976.

e-mail me:torontopianotuning@gmail.com

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You may have seen this on You Tube:

I built this machine to “play in” a piano after it has received new action felt or strings, or before a full regulation.

I t ‘s  n o w   f o r  s a l e !   $ 1,000.00 F.O.B. Toronto, ON.

I also built one for André Oorebeek and shipped it to the Netherlands…

www.concertpianoservice.nl

This piano company in California bought the blueprints for my pounder and built their own!

Action and Keyboard Cleaning

The action stack was removed from the key frame:

The Hammer Rail, Hammer Rest Rail, and Regulating Rail were removed:

A closeup of the Whippens:

If you zoom in, you can see that not only is the graphite lubrication worn through, but the jacks are not aligned to the line in the jack window, and some of the jacks are rubbing on their sides.

The Whippens were then cleaned in the glass bead blasting booth, the hardware cleaned and polished and reassembled.

The Glass Bead Blaster

Before reassembling however, I replaced the graphite paint, centered the jacks, and realigned them.

Closeup of the center section after cleaning:

Before putting the stack aside and moving on to the keys, I had to fix one little thing:

A broken jack had been replaced by a previous technician. Unfortunately, it didn’t match the angle of the originals:

It literally took me about 20 seconds to remove the whippen, break the glue joint in the heel and reglue it at the proper angle. It amazed me that this hadn’t been done properly in the first place.

The keys were then removed from the frame and the frame cleaned.

Before:

After:

Closeup shot of the side of two keys, before and after cleaning:

Each key was individually cleaned and polished. In the next picture you can see the after, and the before:

The keyboard all cleaned:

<- Back to Part 2 | Part 4: Keyboard repairs and reconditioning ->

Back and Belly Reconditioning

After removing the action and case parts, a rubbing was made of the bass strings so that the string maker can rescale and wind the new Bass Strings.

Then all the strings were removed, and then the old tuning pins.

The plate was then removed, cleaned and polished.

As you can see from the picture above, the soundboard is dirty.

To make matters worse, the cracks in the board had been repaired previously without the board having been cleaned. This meant that the glue that was used, glued the dirt to the board.

I did my best to clean the board, and made sure that all the previous repairs were adequate.

The plate was then re-installed, and re-felted.

The plain-wire tenor section restrung.

The treble strings all re-strung.

All done!

<- Back to Part 1 | Part 3: Action and keyboard cleaning ->

Here’s to my mom, Florence Irene Musselwhite.

An excerpt from “Dear Mr. Musselwhite…”

__________________

I may not have inherited my mother’s business acumen, but I did inherit her chutzpah. Both us, when we see that something should be done, even if we have never done it before, just do it. When my sister Barbara, who was at the time the administrator for Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre, asked Mom if she knew of someone who could play bass, accordion and four String Banjo for the show: “The Life and Loves of Edith Piaf”, Mom volunteered me for the job.

There are a few other examples of how my mother is “A Women Who Gets Things Done”, to misquote Farley Mowat. After just over a year on probation, my mother managed to get Prime Minister Trudeau to pardon me and clear my record. Don’t ever tell me how she did it, because I really don’t want to know! My Siblings can tell you that it was not unusual for her to greet us and our friends, at our door with a sledgehammer or a crowbar and have us tear down a wall or two. It could be that she threatened to renovate 24 Sussex Drive.

One story my Dad told me and thankfully I was not there to have experienced it first hand, still saddens and frustrates me, although I couldn’t help but laugh when I heard it.

Player Pianos were all the rage in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Their mechanism, which relied on suction and countless air-tight hoses and pneumatic motors, was extremely complicated and subject to many problems which were hard to correct. They were also larger and heavier than an already very heavy upright Piano. They were simply a form of entertainment, so when more transportable and varied entertainment became common, including radio, T.V. and “Hi-Fi” recordings, they quickly became obsolete. As a result, many people hired my father to gut the player mechanism and turn it into an ordinary Piano, so that their immense weight would be lessened. Quite a few others simply gave them up. There were people who got rid of their Piano even if it wasn’t a player, just to make room for their new television.

My father amassed a huge collection of now irreplaceable parts for old Pianos during the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties. They filled an entire room in the basement of our house. One day, feeling the urge to renovate, my mother simply called up a truck and had it all taken to the dump. She did this without informing my father. He came home from work one day to find that miraculously, there was a nice new bedroom in the house! Over the past years I would have given my eye teeth for some of those long-gone parts and so would many other Technicians across the country.

Now, mind you, my mother did have a few moments of weakness. When I was two, I stuck my right index finger into the eye-hole of a kaleidoscope. The sharp metal edge cut through my skin and, bleeding profusely, I ran to my mother. For probably the only time in her entire life, my mother panicked. The result was the astonishing arrival of the police, the fire department and an ambulance, within minutes of each other. My finger still bears the scar of that event and I am sure, it very likely left a mark of a different sort on our now-white-haired neighbours.

Later in her life, my mother had to endure the amputation of both her baby toes. After the operation, because of a shortage of rooms, they put her into a padded cell in the psych ward, just until general anesthetic had worn off. My Dad and I were with her when she awoke. An expression of fear crept into her face as she said hesitantly, “Did I go crazy?” I hugged her, full of love, and told her that of course she hadn’t, she was as sane as she always was.

My mother is a great people-person. Over the years, countless friends passed through our doors. Parties, Bridge Clubs and Glee-Club gatherings were frequent events in our house. She had more close friends than I could even begin to mention, but sadly, at time of writing, quite a few of them have passed on.

I remember vividly the time she announced to all of us that, from that moment on, she would be called Flora. She never liked any of the contractions of her full name, “Florence Irene”, so she decided to just make up one her own. She has since reverted back to Florence, so don’t call her Flo, or Floss and especially not Flossy. She really hates that one.

 __________________

Sadly, my mother has passed over to the great music store in the sky.

Here’s her obit.

I miss you mommy.

A nice writeup about The Seven Foot Project by John Terrauds…

http://musicaltoronto.org/2012/05/12/its-time-to-bring-some-old-master-values-to-the-world-of-pianos/

Thanks John!