Restoration of a player piano that is also an orchestrian for the Dahl family of McKinney Texas
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47) Here, you see another lock and cancel valve being made to turn the accordion on
and off. The original installation had the accordion playing all the time whether
the roll called for it or not. This would have sounded weird at best. With
this small device added to the system, the music will make much more sense.
48) Here, the wind regulator and volume control device continues to be built.
This picture shows the spill plate on the left with the spill valve with its felt backed,
leather facing.
49) Here, the spill plate has been attached to the body of the device and felt
packing is being placed inside the holes. On the left side of the previous picture,
you can see that the spill plate has mesh screening attached to the inside face.
This screen keeps the felt packing from being sucked into the unit. This felt will
keep the air intake from making noise.
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50) This picture shows the completed expression device. With this design, not
only do we get expression added to the music, but we are also able to cut the overall
suction levels down to a reasonable volume. The original installation as it was when
it arrived at the shop was set up to run constantly at no less than 25 inches of vacuum
pressure. This vacuum level is sufficient to break action parts as well as make your
ears bleed from the sheer noise. Finally, this device also acts as a reservoir of
air. Whenever the piano is playing along at a given suction level and a very large
chord is suddenly called for, this device springs open quickly to add additional air to
the system to keep any of the notes in this sudden chord from dropping out. So, in
summary, it like three benefits in one device.
51) These are the snare drum beaters before restoration. The way it was set up
originally, I gather that there must have been something amiss with the wind trunk.
(The wind trunk is the device that everything is glued to.) To try and keep this
trunk from leaking, it had been wrapped completely in pneumatic cloth. Instead of
that, during this restoration, the trunk itself was restored to make it air tight without
the need of wrapping it in black cloth. One thing did have to be added to this
device since it was missing from the original installation. One of these beaters is
tap and the other roll. The roll pneumatic must have a self repeating valve in order
for it to sound like a drum roll. There was no such valve in the system so it would
only tap instead of roll. A self repeating valve was made for it.
52) In addition to the missing self repeating valve, only 1/2 of one valve block was
actually present to run these beaters. Happily, I had access to two replacement
valves of the same design that could be rebuilt and installed into this unit. You
can see these replacement valves after they were restored in the bottom left portion of
this picture. In this picture, everything has been restored and polished and the
pneumatics are being glued back onto the trunk. There was some difficulty getting
these pneumatics off the trunk to begin with since they were not gasketed. In this
restoration, these are receiving paper gaskets as has everything else in this project to
ensure that they can be removed safely with no damage years from now when they need to be
restored again.
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53) Here you see the triangle beater and the wood block beater being readied for
restoration. Sadly, the wood block needs to be self repeating again but had no valve
for that. So a new one had to be made. Also, the triangle beater had no
triangle present to beat so a triangle had to be purchased and a hanger system designed
for it. Another pneumatic which shuts the piano down after one song is played for
the coin operation system was also restored at this time but pictures were not taken of
that.
54) In this picture, you see a device with three pneumatics with red beater heads on
them. These are the new beaters that were made to run the bass drum/timpani function
on the piano. The original installation was clearly made with the bass drum and
cymbal "mocked up." In other words, they were in the piano but they never
played. This is seen in the fact that there were no beaters present for them nor
were there any screw holes that would indicate where beaters had been secured in the past.
Finally, it was made clear that no beaters were present in the fact that there was
no room for beaters in the place and manner that the drum was positioned. At the
bottom right of this picture is another newly made beater pneumatic for the cymbal.
The cymbal was attached to the bass drum in the original set up. This has the sad
effect of causing the drum to speak each time the cymbal is played. This is not good
musically. Therefore, this beater hasn't received a mounting stand until it can be
decided between myself and the owner where the cymbal should be placed.
55) Here is a closer picture of the wood block and triangle beaters after
restoration.
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56) Here you can see the finished snare drum beaters with their replacement valves
installed, trunk restored and air tight and pneumatics recovered. There was a great
deal of heavy corrosion on the metal parts but these cleaned up very nicely as can be seen
in the shine on these parts in this photo. Also, on the right hand pneumatic can be
seen a block of wood with a tube running out of it and down to the valve for that
pneumatic. This block is a carefully machined valve that contains a close fitting
rod which is attached to the trunk block of this device. When the pneumatic closes
it causes the block to move with it, sliding the block along this polished brass rod.
Inside this block, the rod (at just the precisely correct point) blocks the signal
coming from the tracker bar. This momentarily shuts off the signal and turns the
valve off. Then the spring on the pneumatic opens the pneumatic along with the new
valve block and reactivates the valve, closing the pneumatic many times each second.
In order for this new valve block to work properly, everything must be precision
milled to close tolerances and then dry graphite is coated on the working surfaces to make
them work freely. Any change in the exact position of the valve parts would reduce
the speed of operation. With this block in place, the pneumatic will operate to make
a beautiful sounding snare drum roll.
57) Here, you see the piano partially reassembled. In order to determine how
to design and build the mounting brackets for some of the percussion instruments that had
to have new beaters and or valves, it was necessary to put the piano back together enough
to be able to see where there was clearance and where there wasn't.
58) This shows the brand new pneumatics that were made for (from left to right):
the reiterating pneumatic to drive the tambourine, the soft pedal pneumatic and the
damper pedal pneumatic. It is important to have the soft pedal pneumatic especially
because its inclusion doubles the number of expression levels that the roll can produce.
The expression device/wind regulator can produce three suction levels.
Combined with the use of the soft pedal pneumatic, you get six total levels of
volume. This makes the expressiveness of the music much more subtle. At this
point it will take about another 8 hours to finish building all the new parts that this
piano requires. It took 63 hours to get the new piano parts built to the point shown
here. With the last 8 hours needed for completion it will make a total of 71
additional hours for the making of new parts for this piano. In each case, the new
parts should have been in the piano. It was very startling and frustrating (as the
piano was taken apart and each item tested for completeness) to find so many things
missing. I would never have expected that any human capable of building such an
instrument would leave out so much! Even the pump, which was present and perfectly
fine to all outside appearance, turned out to be incomplete. Upon testing the pump,
it was discovered that the way it had been adapted to serve in this piano had been totally
incorrect. That is why the expression device/wind regulator had to be made, because
the pump set up was done in such a way that the piano would always play so incredibly loud
as to break action parts and hurt the listeners ears.
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59) The movers that brought the piano to the shop from Texas damaged a number of
parts to the piano. These parts are being repaired at no cost to the customer.
Here, you see that the snare drum was badly damaged by the movers and is being
repaired. The mounting bracket for the snare was also broken but it was a poorly
made thing and would have been replaced anyway. It was made of unfinished pine.
The replacement will be made of poplar and clear coated like the other wooden parts
in the piano. The movers were not totally to blame for this. The piano was
designed in such a way that it was impossible to move the thing without taking it apart
into many pieces. These many loose pieces were the main reason for the damage.
Never the less, the movers have been fired.
60) Now the rebuilding of the piano itself begins. Here, you can see the
keybed with the keys have been removed from the piano as has the bottom board with its
pedals.
61) Here, the piano has been gutted out. The strings, tuning pins and plate
are out. You can see by looking carefully at the wood at the top of the piano
(called the pin block) that this piano has been treated chemically at some point in an
attempt to make it stay in tune better. This chemical actually did more harm than
good since it practically rotted out the wood over time.
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62) Three pianos are being worked on at the same time and all three are ready to
have their sound boards dried. Therefore, all three are being put under a tent
together. The air under the tent will be gently heated and well circulated with a
fan to keep a constant humidity level all around each piano. Follow this link to see the tent closed up with the
warmed air swirling around inside.
63) Here, the pin block is being copied onto paper patterns. From these
patterns, jigs are designed so that a router can be used to remove the old wood around the
tuning pin areas.
64) You can see, in this picture, that two of the tuning pin sections have been
routed out along with matching inserts made of fresh Delignit pin block material.
The templates that were used can also be seen here. The one to the far right is set
up onto the piano and is ready for cutting.
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65) The original pin block area of this piano only had three layers of maple that
went about 3/4" deep. The rest of the tuning pin was supported by a solid maple
block with no further laminations. The new inserts travel down into the inner solid
block and pass completely through the three surface layers. The outermost of these
three layers had been exposed to the most outside air and had, as a result, completely
lost its glue bond with the inner two layers. A new outer layer had been made and is
now being clamped onto the inner two layers. Once the glue has dried, the sections
that had been cut out previously will be opened back up with the router and a special
flush cutting bit that will repeat the pattern of the holes exactly into the new layer.
In addition, the bass section had a fourth layer that (although it was still glued
to the third layer) had to come off as well. It was also replaced and shaped to fit.
It will be glued into place after the clamps in this picture come off.
66) The new Delignit pin block inserts have been matched up inside the piano and the
plate installed in order to index the tuning pin locations. Now the holes for the
tuning pins are being drilled at the drill press before being glued into the piano.
Drilling at the press rather than inside the piano offers many advantages since it is
possible to mount the press so that it cannot move. Drilling in the piano
necessitates a mounting system for the drill press that is not as stable leading to uneven
drilling and tuning pins that vary too much in tightness. On the other hand,
drilling at the bench as is being done here, allows for a much more even job.
