Emerson Upright Rebuild Page Two
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In picture seven, you can see that it was decided to "plug" this piano's pin block. What this means is that instead of replacing the entire piece of wood, the holes that hold the tuning pins are enlarged and a plug made of a material called Delignit is glued and driven into place. In the case of upright pianos, I often like to use this method. The nice thing about plugs is that they provide a quality multilaminated surface for the tuning pins to grip. The original pin block on most upright pianos is a rather thin affair of perhaps 3/4" or 1". These Delignit plugs provide the equivalent of a one and one half inch pin block surface presented to the tuning pins. While putting a new one inch thick pin block into an upright is also a very acceptable method, it can be a lot more expensive than plugging and may not always provide as good a result. Of course, in grand pianos, where a full thickness of new pin block can readily be installed it is better to replace the entire block rather than plugging the old block. Go to the Grand Piano Rebuild pages to see this being done. In picture eight, the new plugs are all in place and the surface of the plugs has been trimmed flush and sanded smooth. This particular piano has what we call an "open faced" pin block. This means that you can see the wood of the pin block clearly when all the strings and the plate are back in place. Therefore a layer of veneer was placed onto the surface of the newly plugged block to hide the appearance of the new plugs and leave a clean new looking surface.
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In picture ten, you can see the locations for the tuning pins being transferred onto the freshly restored pin block from a template that was made during disassembly. In picture eleven, you can see the tuning pin holes being drilled. It is important when drilling tuning pin holes that each hole be exactly the same as every other hole. To ensure this, I use only the highest quality pin block drilling bits, I regulate my drilling speed very carefully. I also use vacuumed air to pull all waste wood away as it's created and to keep the bit at a constant working temperature that is low enough to prevent scorching the wood. In picture twelve, you can see the sound board has been carefully restored. All the bad glue joints and cracks have been repaired in such a way as to restore as much of the boards original "crown" as possible. See the paragraph at the end of this article for information on what crown is in a sound board and what it is for. All sound boards that I restore also get a careful bleaching so that they will appear new. Many rebuilders skip over this step as well as skipping over many other small things in an attempt to cut their costs and work time. When an antique sound board is scraped and refinished without proper bleaching, the finished product ends up looking dirty, drab and orange colored. It takes time to do this nicety as well as many of the other small things that I do when restoring a piano but these things add up to a finished product that is truly as good as it can be.
