I'm not a piano technician

[Scodiddly]

I still keep expecting your first post to start out with "...but I play one on TV."

Ahh, so I'm not the only one.

Was tempted to make some videos, but probably won't. At this point maybe it would be good if somebody did that whole ultra-long "back from the dead" type of rebuild series, and there is a guy sort of doing that. But it's not going to be me, I can barely make a 30 second video once a year.
https://youtu.be/iKAeSI1F03A

[Scodiddly]

Earlier I mentioned the "previous" piano. The current piano is a 1967 Cable, another upright but tall enough to have a proper action, not a dropped action. The Wurlitzer had the kind of action that is dropped several inches to allow for a smaller case, and as a result has the connection to the keys made by "stickers" which have to be disconnected and tied off every time you need to remove the action. The action in the Cable can be much more easily removed, and if you're doing repairs you may end up doing that several times. This piano seems luckier in the choice of wood glue, and also I believe it's been much better maintained than the Wurlitzer was. Probably at some point in the past 10 years the soundboard was reglued to the frame in a messy-looking but effective repair. This is the kind of stuff to keep an eye out for when evaluating a "free" piano, because any piano you find for free will probably need a bit of work and fairly often rather a lot of work. Pianos are like cars, they not only degrade by being used but also just while they are sitting around. Lots of weather-sensitive wooden parts, felt bits, and metal that can corrode.

Rear view of upright piano, showing glue squeeze-out

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[Scodiddly]

So yeah, free pianos. Easy to find, not so easy to move. Here in the Chicago suburbs it cost $275 to have the current piano moved from one house a half hour away to my house, 2-3 steps at each end. So that's the first expense, though if you've got access to a van, a ramp, and a few friends you may well be able to do it much cheaper. (that's how the Wurlitzer got here). Check with rental places for a "piano dolly" or "piano hand trucks".

The current piano, the Cable, was another piano donated to the congregation but so far it's just been fostered by members and moved when somebody wanted it out of their house. This one is actually decent enough to be used, especially after the work that I've done - nothing amazing, and would have been done a lot quicker by a professional, but it's done. The piano will normally be stored in a closet and then rolled out on Sunday mornings (rented meeting space), so it needs better wheels. Factory piano wheels, if you were wondering, are made of metal and tend to be hard on wooden floors. They're made that way because 99% of all pianos sit in the space spot for decades, and rubber wheels would collapse over that time. In this case the piano needs much softer wheels with a larger footprint to avoid damaging the wood floors, so I built and installed dollies:

Upright piano DIY dolly, side view

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Upright piano DIY dolly, rear view

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Commercial dollies for installation go for a few hundred dollars, and for some reason the ones for this kind of piano (with the front legs) are more like $800 plus shipping. I spent about $130 on some strut channel (aka Unistrut), 105-pound rated wheels, and hardware. The wood (oak) mostly came from the previous piano. This piano now rolls around like butter on a hot skillet, and probably I'll have to make some wedges to keep it from rolling around while being played. This would also be nice in a studio setting, so the piano can be easily put in different locations and stored out of the way when needed. The only downside is that the keyboard and pedals are now a couple inches higher than normal, which could be fixed by making a removable platform to fit under the pedals and to raise the piano bench (or just buy an adjustable bench).

[Scodiddly]

One of the more interesting areas in working on old pianos is voicing. Over time the parts can stiffen up, but there are great modern lubricants designed specifically for pianos - Protek CLP is kind of the standard, the WD-40 of the piano world. Oddly enough you don't want to go too crazy with this stuff, because having some amount of friction is also important. Knowing what I know at the moment, I'd probably say lubricate everything except the hammer pivot points unless they're actually stiff or sticky.

The other big thing is that the hammer faces, which are very dense felt, tend to get grooved from the strings and eventually it changes the impact area enough to start sounding bad. Usually the solution is to literally sand away material to restore the shape, but this does require attention to keep the proper shape of the hammer instead of just flattening out one part.

Another area of voicing is to soften the felt of the hammers, either by poking with a fine needle, or chemically (search for "piano hammer vodka trick") soften the felt to loosen it up slightly. Both the string grooves and overly dense felt can cause the piano to sound bright or harsh. On both pianos I've worked on so far, I was able to reduce the "tinny old piano" sound quite a bit and get to where the piano actually sounded not bad.

Again, if you've got a nice piano and have a good piano technician, keep using them! If on the other hand you want to fool around with old pianos that would otherwise get junked, go for it! I'm actually looking ahead to a really high-end but very old Mason and Hamlin upright piano that a friend's parents need to give away, so best if I learn most of the gotchas on free pianos first. The future piano will not be a Beethoven piano until somebody drops $10-20k on a rebuild, but it should be a fabulous casual piano with some more affordable work.

[roscoenyc]

Dolly is key for any piano that gets moved, even a little bit.
We got one years ago for our spinet after the piano tech showed me how even just moving one end of the piano out a foot or two over time was totally disrupting the integrity of the piano. I think ours cost a couple hundred bucks. The positive side effect is that the tuning is more stable too.

[Scodiddly]

Here's an interesting detail about the current piano. Four of the strings have aluminum instead of copper wrapping. Weird, and I'd never heard of that, had to ask a piano technician friend. Aluminum is lighter than copper, and apparently it was a bit of a fad at one point to use it for transitional areas where copper would have been too heavy. Probably impossible to find these days, maybe they could be made? Wrapped piano strings are usually custom made for each piano, if you needed to restring you'd ideally just send all the wrapped strings in for duplication. Unwrapped strings are literally just wire that comes on a spool, "piano wire".

The problem with these aluminum strings, on this piano is that they were bad. Gave out a sad dead plunk when played, and not something I probably could find. My friend the piano tech came through with a suggestion, though - loosen each string, and give it a twist in the direction of the windings. Piano strings terminate in loop around a small post, so I gave each of them a half-twist and brought them back up to pitch. It worked! I guess it tightened up the loose windings. Those notes are still a tiny bit different than the ones around them, but it's acceptable.

Piano with some aluminum-wrapped strings.

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