Restoration of a Knabe Ampico Reproducing Upright for Carol Drummond
271) 
272) 
273) 
271) The next thing that had to be done is that each piece
of hardware that attaches to the bottom board had to be removed, cleaned, sealed,
rebushed, polished, lacquered and then reattached to the new board.
272) Most pianos have bushings in the wood pedal board but this design actually has
the bushings done in leather and wrapped around the pedals themselves. Then the
springs which help the pedals return ride under the brass pedal. I found that this
design was flawed. The springs were prone to producing noise by the old design.
To improve this, I wrapped the pedals in graphited felt to silence the springs and
encased the springs in cotton braiding to mute any vibrations that happen to set up in the
spring. This ensures a quite running system. Before, the pedals had been kept
quite by greasing them. I have found the greasing piano pedals only solves the
problem for a short time; eventually the squeaking returns. With this design, the
pedals should forever be quite.
273) Installing the restored pedal board. The glue joints on this board were
so bad that I had to reglue it all three times. The first time was months ago when I
first stripped, stained, filled and sealed the board. However, the wait for the
opportunity to get around to lacquering the board gave it time to reveal additional areas
where the glue was about to fail. These projects can take years to complete at times
but the delays are always worth it. Having the piano in the shop for extra time
always gives me a chance to pick up all the little failings that aren't immediately
apparent so they can be fixed before the piano goes back home. This ensures that my
restorations tend to be more trouble free than those which run through a shop in two
months and are right back home again.
274) 
275) 
276) 
274) The bottom board has been reattached to the piano.
275) Another shot showing the new bottom board installed.
276) This board had been used to help clamp the sound board in place. But a
month later, the glue on it showed its true colors and the board came loose. I'm
regluing it here.
277) 
278) 
279) 
277) The design of this piano was such that the keybed and
legs were held in place by the white block shown here. However, the way they
installed that block made it impossible to ever remove the leg and keybed for restoration.
They blocks had to be split apart to gain access to those components.
Therefore, new blocks that match the originals exactly have been manufactured.
These will be epoxied and doweled to the legs to form one piece with the leg like
before. But the section that is still white in this photo will be screwed to the
piano. The screws will do all the work of holding things firmly but will allow us to
remove the legs and keybed in the future without the need of damaging anything. Wood
plugs will conceal the screws and leave a nice decorative finish over the screw locations
that is nicely in keeping with the overall style of the piano. The next step is to
color match the new blocks to the piano and lacquer them. Then they can be glued to
the legs and screwed into place.
278) The hammers are now installed onto the action. The next step is to fine
tune their alignment with the strings. This is done by heating the shanks so that
they can be bent left of right as needed. On most styles of actions, the hammers can
be tweaked back and forth with a simple set screw but this design of action doesn't allow
for that. Any final adjustments that can't be corrected by moving the hammers are
corrected by moving the strings themselves. This is why we had to wait for the
hammers to arrive before we could proceed with the project. Without the hammers, I
don't know where the final placements are for the strings. And without that, I
cannot install the dampers.
279) Getting ready to install the damper felts onto the restored levers.
280) 
281) 
282) 
280) The damper felts were a special type of a higher
quality than is available on the market today. Therefore, I took an extra day to
hand make this set of damper felts using grand damper felt and wood connectors that were
cut by hand in the shop. This resulted in a much better damping result than could
have been gotten from standard damper felts.
281) Because the spine of the piano had been so badly unglued at the beginning of
this project, the last thing I did before putting the strings under final tension was to
install two heavy bolts that went through the plate, the pin block, the support columns
and the back cover plate. This will help to sandwich all the layers together and
keep the system from failing again in the future.
282) The reinforcing bolts as seen from behind the piano.
283) 
284) 
285) 
283) This is the motor of the player mechanism. One of
the spring mounts that held the motor in place was broken and a new one had to be made.
You see the new one and me holding up the broken one next to it in this photo.
284) This piano came to me with no switch for auto-replay and shut-off. This
is a replacement switch that I had to alter in order to match it into the system and make
it fit where it belonged while blending in with the other components.
285) These are the damper lift rods. One is restored and the other will be
restored shortly. They get new leather, new bushings, repainted and relubricated.
286) 
287) 
288) 
286) The upper part of the piano showing that the equalizers
have been reinstalled into their original positions. One of the few aspects of this
installation that was done right when I got the piano was the placement of these
pneumatics.
287) This photo shows the lower components installed back into place. The
entire reassembly of this player mechanism should have only taken a day or two.
Instead, it turned into many weeks because it became more and more apparent as we started
to try to get all the components operating properly that many of the items you would
expect an Ampico Reproducer to have were missing out of this piano. Because so many
parts were missing, Knabe had to reengineer (in house) a tubing design for the system to
make it work despite the fact that it was missing so many important components. As
a result of our decision to upgrade this unit the a better take up spool because of the
missing original, we were forced to make many other changes and to face the fact that it
was now impossible to tube up the system the way Knabe had done it. The design had
to be upgraded to function like Amphion originally designed it. Valve blocks had to
be made to replace ones which were missing and tubing connectors which are special order
items had to be ordered in to compensate for the fact that they were missing out of this
unit. To give you an idea of how badly this system was originally installed, the
crescendo units were installed in the piano upside down when I got it. I had to
rework how the expressions and the crescendos were oriented in the piano to make room for
them in the right side up position. This should also help to improve their function
over how they operated originally since the Crescendo is not really designed to operate
properly when it is upside down.
288) The design of the lid of this piano calls for the short portion of the lid to be
glued to the back frame. Many pianos have these boards attached via a set of screws
making it easy to remove them later. However, this board was glued down to stay true
to the original design.
289) 
290) 
291) 
289) Once the player mechanism has been totally installed
and all the linkages and tubing completed, it must be run for a period of time to ensure
that it will operate properly without developing problems. The biggest difficulty we
ran into on this unit is the tracking design. The fingers that track with the roll
are not the best method for tracking any piano roll so it took a lot of adjusting and
patience to get them operating properly. In addition, there were other challenges.
When the mechanism was fired up and run successfully for the first time, it made a
great deal of noise. At first I suspected that the action screws had not been
sufficiently seated and the action was responsible for the noises. There was no way
to track the problem until the mechanism came out again for installation of the midi
interface. Since this style of action is very hard to remove from the piano without
doing damage to it, the piano or yourself, I remove it only when I must. Once the
mechanism was out again, I discovered that the noise was coming from the lifter finger
return rail. The felt on that rail was hard enough that it was letting the mechanism
make noise when the fingers fell upon it. I had bench tested this and found the felt
to be in good shape and operating well so I left it. However, in actual use, it let
us down so I removed all the lifter finger and installed new felt on the action once I had
it out to stop the noise. The next time the mechanism was used inside the piano it
operated as quiet as it was design to so the extra work proved worth it.
290) Here is the installation of the valve blocks that interface the computer with
the player mechanism. These valve blocks must be tubed to the actions tubing buss
and is wired to a midi interface device which also has two power modules and an automatic
motor starting switch. Because of the close quarters in the piano, I had to sew a
heavy fabric cradle for the midi interface to rest in. I placed the midi interface
on the under side of the lid and secured it with a thick layer of felt between the midi
and the lid and the cloth cradle securing it. All the power cords and data cables
were then slipped into an extra strap which was sewn into the pouch. The motor
switch was able to be installed by placing it onto the automatic shut off pneumatic and
screwing it there.
291) Here is the midi interface after it was tubed into the system buss.
292) 
293) 
292) The finished piano playing and ready for delivery.
293) This photo shows our own little touch that we add to our projects. It is
a dust cover for the keys with an embroidered copy of the nameboard decal and the
customer's name. That and a new key which was hand ground to fit the unusually
designed lock of this unit were a couple extras that were done to make the finished
product feel extra special to the owner who has waited patiently a long time to have her
piano restored completely.
This is one of those sad examples where the customer fails to treat the rebuilder with the same honesty and respect as I have treated them. As it turned out in the end, this customer manipulated me into letting the piano be delivered before the final payment was made. As a result she was able to cheat me out of the cost of replacing her missing take up spool and on the installation cost for the midi interface. I can see now from how she was behaving that she had in mind all along to do this but was playing her cards close to the vest until she had me over a barrel. For reference of any person seeking to have work done in my shop, it should be noted that her actions have caused her to forfeit all warrantee on any and all work done to the piano. Since I understand she had the movers place the piano in an area that will be very hard on the instrument, it will be totally her loss if the cold drafts blowing over the piano cause any problems. If you don't pay the bill, you can't expect to get any warrantee. In fact, I had every intention of suing her for the money she owed but my wife talked me out of it; not wanting the stress of a law suit distracting us at this time.
Be aware: In future no pianos shall be shipped from my shop until after the bill has been settled in full. No exceptions.
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