You can decide up an old antique piano for $400. I know, due to the fact I just bought 1. But how do you know if it truly is value acquiring at all? Will it be repairable and will it be Alright for your youngster to find out on? You need to know what to search for.
The wrest plank and tuning pins of my Moore & Moore upright piano all appeared exceptional. It was a single of the very best I might ever seen in that respect–there was no proof of broken or abused pins, they all looked original, none experienced been hammered in, none experienced marks on them, they have been not bent and there were no indicators of cracks or other harm to the wrest plank. The sound board (the largest piece of wood, driving the strings in the centre of the instrument) had no cracks both, and the strings all looked fantastic. The motion (the moving parts) labored nicely on all the notes, and the dampers stopped the seem of each notice when you lifted the essential or elevated the damper pedal. There was 1 lacking plastic essential, but that would be simple to exchange. Most previous pianos would not search so very good on the inside.
Then, a pair of months afterwards I received a grievance from the extremely dissatisfied purchaser:
“Hello Margaret. Following we had the piano sent we got a piano tuner out and ended up genuinely disappointed…it was not able to be tuned…when the tuner experimented with to tighten the pins they would unwind straight away and she said it was no good at all…so we have hired a piano. When the guys came out to deliver the [new] piano they also mentioned “No, which is cactus…”
But the piano was in fact really tunable, and the within workings had been in very excellent issue. Sooner or later, following more suggestions from me, the purchaser realised he’d found a really usable instrument.
The ability of the tuner is paramount to keeping the strings and tuning pins ‘on pitch.’ When residing in the remote city of Karratha, I taught myself to tune a quite outdated piano in much worse issue than this. I also did some tunings on a pair of my students’ old pianos. In all instances it was extremely challenging to maintain them in tune for more than a couple of minutes, partly because of to my poor approach with the tuning hammer (lever). However, when a skilled tuner arrived to town he did a great work and the a few rickety outdated pianos stayed well in tune for several months.
When a piano has not been tuned for some a long time it might require much more than one tuning to ‘come up to pitch.’ It truly is not possible to know how properly this is heading to pan out, you can only try out it and see how several tunings it wants. The strings have tonnes of stress and you have to wait for the stress to even out just before performing one more tuning. It can consider months before the tuning settles.
When piano moving london bought my Moore & Moore piano I told him it needed re-hydrating (it essential far more h2o or moisture in the wood). If the wrest plank had dried out the pins would undoubtedly be loose. In Karratha we re-hydrated all three outdated pianos and it produced a Huge big difference. The basic treatment is to place a beaker of drinking water inside of the piano at the bottom. The even bigger, the far better, simply because individuals have a tendency to neglect about them and they sooner or later run out of drinking water. It will take weeks to have an influence. This re-hydrating also appeared to correct an action difficulty that two of our pianos had. Some tuners will not like water beakers, they reckon they will cause difficulties with the action or rust the strings so expert guidance should be sought from a specialist technician, but it labored properly for us. There are commercially-accessible humidifiers/de-humidifiers specially made for pianos.
One more low-cost approach to aid with the tuning is to hammer the pins into the wrest plank. It really is a standard cure but there’s a limit to how a lot and how frequently the pins can be hammered in. The pins on this outdated piano looked like they’d never ever been hammered at all, so that was even now a practical option. It’s absolutely a work for a experienced piano technician, to avoid damage to the pins or wrest plank.
A considerably more pricey method is to exchange the pins with greater pins (they appear in diverse dimensions), but it would be a large endeavor and it would be less expensive to get yet another piano.