Using heat, the warped or twisted hammer shank can be respoitioned, so that the hammer is aligned correctly again.

Hammers can sometimes become misaligned because the shank has twisted.

Pedals like this help to date the piano, along with other features.

This is the inside of this Victorian parlour piano’s top lid. Look at the beautiful veneer finish, even on the inside! And this on a budget, entry-level piano. Nowadays, special veneer finishes on a piano cost a great deal extra.

The Nameboard behind the keys often had both the manufacturer’s and the retailer’s name on it.

The keyboard “lid” on a piano is called the Fall. The slip or batten of wood behind the keys is called the Nameboard. Retailers often put their name here.

This is the serial number. Serial numbers of pianos by the big makers have been collated and published in books, but records from the often short-lived little cottage-industry workshops are long since lost. Muirhead and Turnbull are the retailer, and it is possible that this number is theirs, and not the maker’s.

Tuners sometimes leave a card or label inside the piano and write the date each time it is tuned. I didn’t pay attention to this faded old label last time I called, but this time I looked more closely and realised it was one of these date record labels.
Have a look at the dates. The one you can see most clearly is 16/1/99. Today is 20/1/12. But, gentle reader, that older date is not 1999, but 1899. One hundred and thirteen years and four days ago, a tuner got his fountain pen out, and recorded his work.

I wonder when Mr Mathers tuned this piano...

This piano has the “spring & loop” type action, as opposed to the modern bridle-tape underdamper action. In my experience, spring & loop actions, even when all working OK, don’t feel as responsive as a bridle tape action of the same age.

Sometimes, like this one, pianos of this era had tuning pins with oblong heads. Tuning pins now always have square profile ends, so that a star-shaped tuning lever tip can fit on in a variety of positions. The tuning lever tip for oblong pins can only fit on in two positions, and this makes it MUCH harder to tune the piano. Why did anyone ever think oblong pins were a good idea? They couldn’t have been any cheaper to manufacture. The use of a T-type tuning lever would probably make things a bit easier.

Quite often the sharp (black) keys on these pianos are this shape, going down at the back, like harmonium keys.

Beautiful casework on Victorian budget parlour piano

Vitorian Parlour Piano

In the late 19th century in England there were many little ”cottage industry” piano workshops, making budget-range pianos for the middle-class parlours of the nation.
These were made down to a price, as it were, and even when brand new, had nothing like the sound quality and action response of the solid pianos from the best makers. But they met a market demand at the time. And many of them are still in existence and still being played.
What’s remarkable though is that even in these budget-level pianos, the casework was often beautiful. Lovely hardwood timber veneers, and the skilled labour to craft them, were readily available in those days.
I tuned one of these today, and the lady who owns it very kindly gave me permission to take and to post photographs of it.

Glencoe

I drove to a client in the Highland town of Fort William today, which involved a drive across Rannoch Moor and through Glencoe. Site of a massacre 320 years ago this month. It’s a fairly bleak place even in summer, and certainly more so on a grey January day.

Bibliography page

I added a Bibliography page to my website http://www.davidboyce.co.uk/bibliography.php

Home-made replacement music desk!

School pianos can get a bit of rough treatment over the years. On one of the school pianos I tuned recently, the music desk (the little fold-down “tray” to rest sheet music on), was pretty smashed up, and held on partly with sellotape.
The Principal Teacher of Music mentioned having seen a music tray that ran the whole length of the keyboard. As an experiment, I got some mahogany mouldings, and made a longer replacement music tray, which you can see here.
The original music desk on these Welmar/Marshall & Rose pianos had the little brass bookholders. In schools they soon get lost. So the desk I made doesn’t have them, the music instead being retained by the “lip” of quarter-moulding at the front. It is slightly tricker to page-turn, but I hope the advantages of the new desk will outweigh this disadvantage. Two of the hinges are hidden behin the music book. For good measure, I could have aded another two hinges nearer the end, to make six in total. But it’s pretty solid as it is.
The colour is not a great match. I applied two coats of Button Polish (an amber-ish French Polish) and steel wool & wax. I was doing this job as an experimental “freebie” within a short timescale. It would be possible to make a better job given more time, and careful choice of wood stain.
I await with interest the teachers’ report on how well the new desk functions!

Where moth and rust (well moth anyway) consume.....

It was a couple of years since a friend’s piano had been tuned, and when I went to tune it, the horrible discovery was made that it had been destroyed by a heavy moth infestation. Every felt part was nibbled to bits. End of piano.

Klavins Piano

On my “Pianoddities” page http://www.davidboyce.co.uk/pianoddities.php I mention the amazing 12’1” upright piano Model 307 made by David Klavins. I wanted to put a picture of it, as well as having a link to his site, www.klavins-pianos.com so I emailed Mr Klavins to ask permission. Within two hours I had a very friendly and courteous reply giving permission. What a nice guy!

Variant Spring & Loop Action

Recently I encountered this grand piano action, in a 1930s British small grand piano. This is a variation on the D-Type Spring and Loop action. I don’t know who made this. The action is not quite in original condition; the notch felt seems to have been renewed on the hammer butts, and you can see a little vacant slot in the hammer butt behine the new green felt. What would originally have been in there, I’m not sure.

D-Type Spring & Loop Action

In the 1930s a type of action with fewer components (cheaper to make and smaller) was often fitted to small budget-price grand pianos. The black and white photo shows a catalogue illustration of this type of action made by the UK piano action manufacturer Herrburger Brooks. Below it, is a photo I took of one of these actions recently. (The catalogue picture is of the bass end, my photo of the treble end).
For comparison, at the top is a full grand action, from a top quality action using some modern plastics materials.
As you can see, the D-Type Spring & Loop action is much simpler. The full grand piano action is subtle, and is designed to afford very fast “repetition”; the ability to repeat notes very quickly and reliably without letting the key all the way up. Dr. Brian Capleton in his excellent Piano Action Regulating, A Reference for Students and Professionals says of the D-Type Spring and Loop action that “The action is as much capable of sensitive repetition as the roller action, when it is well-regulated”.
Perhaps it depends on what is meant by “sensitive repetition”, but it’s difficult to see how such a cut-down design can function as sensitively as the full roller repetition action. If it did, why bother to make the more expensive actions? In any piano I’ve played or worked on which has a D-Type Spring & Loop Action, the action simply isn’t as good. It doesn’t have the same feel. Since these were generally fitted to cheaper pianos in which other design compromises were made, the general quality of these pianos is such that it’s not worth spending the money on the time necessary to fully re-regulate the action.

60s plastic parts

This is part of the action for one note from a 1969 piano action. This was relatively early days in the use of plastics for piano action parts. This action had become stiff and sluggish. Examination showed the cause to be tight centres. The parts in a piano action move in little “hinges” called flanges. A metal centre pin (generally nickeled bronze) rotates in a hole bushed with special cloth. In this piano the jacks (the upright part in the middle) rotated freely, but all other centres were tight. The jack centres rotate in wood flanges, and all the others in plastic.
Discussion online brought to light that these early plastic parts are undergoing some continuing “curing” process that is causing them to swell. Other technicians working with the same type of action from the same period report a similar phenomenon.

In this instance, use of a special lubricant designed for piano action centres, was sufficient to get the action playing again reasonably well. But if this swelling process continues, the bushings will get too tight. The best solution in that event, is to replace all the plastic flanges with modern ones, probably wooden. (Modern plastic materials, however, are much superior to their early counterparts, and are found in some very classy piano actions).