Restoration of a Mason & Hamlin Ampico for David Lucas Graves & John Herrmann
97) 
98) 
99) 
97) Because I was very unhappy with the condition of the old
lifter fingers on this action, I am replacing them with new ones. Here, you can see
the newly made fingers being bushed to receive the poppet wires.
98) Using a jig, the new fingers are drilled out for their screw holes. The
awl is used as a tool to hold the finger down snug while the drill press does its work.
The quarters are too tight to use ones fingers for this task, hence the use of a
tool.
99) When this stack was taken apart, you may remember that we already knew the
fingers were not good. Therefore, I made a scale stick for each tier of the stack.
Now that scale stick is being used to position the fingers exactly where they were
originally. The fingers are attached with burnt shellac and reinforced with a small
screw. All the original screws were badly worn from improper previous use. So
new screws are being used throughout.
100) 
101) 
102) 
100) The complete rails with their new lifter fingers in place.
101) Finishing the fingers to match the pneumatics. This way, everything looks
the same age. The repair is totally invisible.
102) Making the leather gaskets that connect all the tiers together and which seal
against the holding brackets.
103) 
104) 
105) 
103) At the bottom right, you will see a large wooden nut which is part of the
mechanism which holds the tiers of the stack together. One of these nuts had long
since broken and been lost. Therefore, a new nut was made to replace it. I
also reinforced both nuts with thread wraps which will prevent them from ever breaking in
the future.
104) The last rebuilder had used some strange things to bracket the tiers to each
other. I had to redo some of that. You can see the metal brackets in this
photo. These bind the centers of the tiers together giving the entire stack a great
deal of additional rigidity.
105) Mounting the valve blocks onto the stack. I did not get to this part of
the job until the valves had been completed for a few weeks. When I came back to the
valves to install them, I found that the curing of the pouch sealant had left the pouches
seeping a bit. Therefore, I used a number of sealing techniques and two additional
days of labor to ensure that the pouches were as air tight as possible before mounting
them to the stack.
106) 
107) 
108) 
106) These are the poppets. They transfer the energy
of the pneumatics to the piano's action. I am cleaning and lubricating them in this
photo. To the left are some unrestored poppets and to the right a row of restored
ones.
107) Getting ready to install the poppets back onto the stack.
108) The poppets are now installed onto the stack.
109) 
110) 
111) 
109) This is the Ampico shut off mechanism. By
triggering this mechanism with a switch in the drawer, the expression system is disengaged
from receiving any signals from the roll. This enables you to play standard 88 note
rolls on the system without randomly triggering the expressions. Some more evidence
that the last rebuilder didn't know what he/she was doing is seen here. The
pneumatic attached to the top of this device is the smallest pneumatic in the piano.
Yet they covered it with medium weight motor cloth. This made the pneumatic
very stiff. In addition, the arm on this pneumatic is covered with pouch leather to
seal against the two nipples beneath it. This leather had not been replaced
properly. Extra layers of unneeded felt had been added and a patch of leather put on
it. I doubt that this ever sealed the nipples properly in this state.
110) The device is opened up, revealing the internal workings. A row of
nipples are covered with a layer of pouch leather. When the leather gets suction
applied to it from the top, it allows the signals to pass through to the expressions.
When the pouches have normal air applied to them, they block the passage of the
air. The pouch leather is old and brittle. Even though it is still intact, it
is not reliable. I like to replace the original Havana pouch leather with chrome
tanned leather. The new pouch leather is still very flexible but it is a little
thicker and lasts longer over the decades. In addition, the original design called
for a cork gasket that was asked to seal against the pouch leather layer. This is
not a very air tight arrangement. I remove the cork and replace it with nothing.
The chrome tanned pouch leather serves perfectly to make a totally air tight seal.
111) The new pouch leather has been cut out and all the air chambers in the device
have been resealed with fresh shellac. All the nipples have been removed, cleaned
and polished; ready to be resealed into the mechanism.
112) 
113) 
114) 
112) The pneumatic has been properly recovered with the
correct thickness of pneumatic cloth and the leather has been glued onto the mechanism.
113) All the nipples have been sealed into the block with a ring of burnt shellac at
the base of each and the pneumatic has been reattached to the device. This pneumatic
is one of the most difficult to recover pneumatics in all of player piano construction.
It is certainly the hardest pneumatic to recover in an Amphion mechanism.
114) From left to right you see, the hammer lift and damper lift valve block, the
amplifier, two control valves, the damper lift pneumatic, two equalizers and the hammer
lift rail pneumatic with its mounting chassis. These are the next components to be
restored.
115) 
116) 
117) 
115) This is the amplifier after it was taken apart to
reveal all the internal components.
116) All air channels get fresh sealant. All leather gets replaced and the
exterior of the block gets repainted. A number of upgrades are done to these when I
rebuild them. The far left block has two flap valves made of leather. I
upgraded the use of leather to the use of buckskin. It will seal better and last
longer than the original type of leather. In addition, the original cork gasket gets
replaced with a leather one (far right.) Finally, since the amplifier does not need
to operate at lighting on and off speeds, I replaced the brown, thin, Havana pouch leather
with the easier to seal and longer lasting chrome tanned pouch leather. The purpose
of the Amplifier is to signal the pneumatic which is attached to the spill valve in the
pump. Normally, the pump spill valve lets enough air leak into the system to keep
the suction at 25" of suction. When you select the Brilliant switch in the
drawer, it signals the amplifier which, in turn, sucks the pneumatic attached to the spill
valve shut. The closing of this pneumatic causes the spring tension on the spill
valve to increase and thus the wind pressure inside the system to increase to about
35" of suction. The amplifier is fed with suction from both sides of the stack.
The two flap valves made of buckskin prevent the side which has the higher suction
level at any given moment to suck air away from the low suction side through the
amplifier. This design ensures that the amplifier will always keep the suction
pressure up no matter what the playing suction levels are. It is a neat design,
which works very well. I can actually think of a way of doing this which would be
far less complicated but this is how they were made and we keep it the same for the sake
of authenticity.
117) The damper lift pneumatic before restoration.
118) 
119) 
120) 
118) One of the rods which lifts the damper rail has a
buckskin covering on its tip. The old buckskin has gotten dry and hard. I've
removed the old piece (far right) and made a new one (middle) from a circle of skin (left)
which was punched from a buckskin hide.
119) The damper lift and the two equalizers after they were cleaned up, resealed,
repainted and rehinged.
120) The hammer lift pneumatic after being cleaned up, resealed, repainted, rehinged
and covered with pneumatic cloth on three sides. The strip laying next to it is for
covering the hinge end after the first three sides firm up.
121) 
122) 
123) 
121) The hammer lift rail pneumatic is now air tight with
new cloth and new hinges. It has been remounted in its chassis.
122) Left and middle are two control valves that handle play/rewind pump pressures.
To the right is the device which handles the damper and hammer lifts.
123) This photo shows these three devices taken apart to reveal how many parts they
actually have. Each component of a reproducing piano looks complicated even when it
is all put together. However, the complexity of the inner parts makes it clear just
how complex these devices were and are. They were truly marvels of engineering in
their day.
124) 
125) 
126) 
124) The first expression is to now be rebuilt. The
devices started above are all sitting letting glue and finish dry. I will work on
the expressions this day and go back to those tomorrow.
125) This photo reveals more clearly just how bad a job the last rebuilder did.
The three expression control pneumatics in the purple color are covered in motor
cloth again. This is far too heavy a cloth for them. Below, the spring
pneumatic and reregulator pneumatic (both covered in black cloth) are done in material
that was far too heavy for them as well. The lower pneumatics should be covered in
the cloth the upper pneumatics actually are covered in and the uppers should be done in
the very thin cloth used on playing pneumatics. In addition, you can see by looking
at the cloth that the last rebuilder lost track of the orientation of the six boards that
make up the upper control pneumatics. The cloth is twisted and pulled every which
way. It will be necessary to plug all the screw holes on the pneumatic boards and
drill out new holes like they did when the device was first built in order to correct this
problem. The way this expression was done, I doubt that it ever expressed the music
at all. It might have produced some general louds and softs but picking out melodies
and accenting individual notes would have been impossible because of the way the mechanism
was rebuilt.
126) Part of the device has been taken apart to reveal the underside of the
expression valve box.
127) 
128) 
129) 
127) In the top left is the other expression and the rest of
the photo is of the expression I am currently rebuilding. This photo was taken to
give you some idea how complex these mechanisms are and how many individual parts they
have. Every single one of these components needs to be perfectly air tight and
functioning and fitting perfectly or the mechanism won't work right.
128) The completed pedal pneumatic actuator valve assembly. One of these
valves lifts the hammer rail and the other lifts the dampers. Due to the length of
tubing between this valve block and the actual pneumatics and also due to the size of the
pneumatics in question; there is a strong case to be made that these valves are too small
for proper activation of these pneumatics. I would much prefer to see two valves for
each of these pneumatics which are preactuated with a primary. This would take us
from two valves up to six. It would, however, make the evacuation of these
pneumatics much faster. However, Amphion knew that the valve's sizes and keyed their
rolls to accommodate it. The important thing to keep in mind is that the valves,
tubing and pneumatics must be absolutely air tight and must be regulated to closely to the
rails they lift. In this way, the pneumatic begins to effect the rails the instant
the valve is triggered. Having the valves on the slow side does make operation a bit
sluggish but Amphion keyed their rolls to turn this liability into an asset.
129) Another photo of the damper lifter pneumatic, amplifier valve block and two
control valve blocks after they were restored.
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