I'm not a piano technician

[Scodiddly]

...but I've been actually doing some of that stuff lately, and I thought it might be interesting and useful to share.

I suppose it started when I got that "basket case" Wurlie from another TOMB member a while back, but it didn't really kick in until several years ago when I was talking to a real piano technician. Turns out you don't need perfect pitch to tune pianos or do other work, you just need what she called "attention to detail" and I interpreted as being able to concentrate much longer than most people. Does it drive you crazy when you can't get your guitar in tune in under 30 seconds? Imagine spending a couple hours on a piano!

So when a donated piano showed up in my living room (long story, but don't let people donate their piano to your church when they move away), I realized that it wasn't good enough for me to spend money on. But on the upside, nobody would be too upset if I screwed up in the process of learning how to tune it. So I watched a couple of videos, invested not all that much money on a student tuning kit from Howard Piano (https://www.howardpianoindustries.com/p ... -mute-kit/), and got to work. I went through a couple different software tuning apps and finally found an iOS app called "AP Tuner" which is sadly not available any more. I don't consider that Strobosoft stuff to be good enough, frankly. But you could start with a basic chromatic tuner, because you're really only using it for a couple octaves in the middle. From there it can be done by ear by doing octaves - I'll stop there, it gets interesting but the videos and other sources cover it pretty well.

[Scodiddly]

Sources - youtube, of course.
Also books, I have the venerable book by Arthur Reblitz about repairing and tuning pianos, also Mario Igrec's much more recent "Pianos Inside Out".
And of course old-fashioned message boards, like the Piano Tuner's Guild websit http://www.ptg.org which has a great forum area.

Beyond tuning I found myself getting into action regulation, which is the various action adjustments needed to make every note work properly. Another tedious task, and I had to do some actual repairs where I was pulling out individual action parts until I really understood how a vertical piano action works. From there I could finally do the adjustments correctly. I found that while books describe all this pretty well, it's just fundamentally difficult to learn because that format has you learn a bunch of names of parts, then learn how they interact. Probably there are some videos that show it better anyway.

[digitaldrummer]

I'm with you. I would need to see it too - or feel it, and watch it, or even disassemble it. I just learn better that way (vs. books - too bad I figured that out after school lol).

[Scodiddly]

So the piano I started with was a 1973 Wurlitzer spinet. Not a great piano by any standard, and as a spinet it had the added bonus of being hard to work on. I did get it to where it sounded pretty good in the midrange (where all the money is anyway), and it stayed in tune pretty well too. But it had more and more weird buzzes, and it came to light that a lot of the glue holding it all together was failing. That would be possible to repair, but not without a lot of work and special tooling.

So instead I disassembled it to see how the hidden parts fit together. Again, this was a piano that had been written off and nobody cared, especially not if it was falling apart. That was an interesting experience. It took about an hour to pull the action and take the front of the piano off, then several evenings to get all the strings and tuning pins out. Finally another hour to take the back apart. And sure enough, most of the glue joints came apart way too easily. But it was educational, and cheaper than having it hauled away. I gave some bits to an artist, saved a lot of wood for building things, and I still have the plate (the cast iron harp thingy) in my garage for the village "bring out your dead" day coming up. Hopefully a scrap metal collector will get it, if they don't blow out their back putting it in their truck.

[mjau]

Proud owner of a 1960’s Wurlitzer upright. You’re inspiring me to learn to tune the damn thing myself.