•Joyce Brite wrote: > Not knowing what else to do, they dumped all of > these brand-new player pianos in Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan has yielded maritime archaeological treasures that, due to the extremely cold temperatures and the fact it is fresh water, have been remarkably well-preserved. Maybe ...

•Stephen K. Goodman said: > Didn't a Dienst orchestrion go down with the Titanic, or was it > the Lusitania? Somewhere in the official history of the (naval) Battle of Jutland in the Great War, it is remarked in passing that nine player-pianos were lost on the British side. We can assume a similar n...

•I am a certified SCUBA diver who has made quite a few dives in Lake Michigan off Chicago. It is indeed impressive how well preserved wooden and metal artifacts are in these cold, salt-free waters. Where else can you see a walking-beam side-wheel steam engine whose bolts look as if you could break t...

•I was shocked to find that player pianos, traded-in at a local piano shop, were just thrown away because they were to expensive to restore, and there wasn't a market for a restored one! I politely called and asked this piano place to give me the player piano mechanisms and everything that could be ...

•Damon Atchison wrote in 971012 MMDigest: > I help people to find a player piano and then I just fix the supply > bellows and wind motor to get it running again. This hasn't failed > me yet. Gee, I think that I'll just hang up my apron and call it quits. All of these years (33) I've been cleaning, s...

•Damon Atchison wrote: > I help people to find a player piano and then I just fix the supply > bellows and wind motor to get it running again. This hasn't failed > me yet. I hate to rain on your parade, Damon. But it _will_ fail you, and very soon, at that. You can fix the supply bellows and wind mo...

•Hi Robbie, This is intended only as a rebuttal to your comments on my statement on the 971014 MMDigest. > [ Perhaps Damon means that he hasn't failed yet to make folks interested > [ in the player piano. I don't think he claimed that the piano was > [ properly repaired -- it's just "patched up". To...

•Anything worth doing is worth doing right, says Al Pebworth in his article. Yes, we who knock ourselves out doing the job properly, get the shaft! We also get a reputation of robbing our customers! A few years ago, a local pub called me to restore an old player piano they had purchased. The respons...

•To what extremes will we go to salvage player pianos? I am one of the worst about keeping any and all playerstuff around. Even ruined pianos have their value under certain circumstances. I remember an old Hamilton player that had been in a fire and the case was charred to the point if no return, bu...

•I have leather on the bellows of my reed organ from 1881. It's a small "cottage organ" with 5 stops, by Estey. It's in very good condition, except I'd like to replace the bellows as an initial step towards restorations. My uncle said that leather may be revived by oils, and that it can be worked in...

•Hi all, This is probably not news to anyone, but when a box is too far gone, I always try and save the labels (including the signature label on the top of many Duo-Art boxes). I cut out the portions of the box containing the labels, drop them in a small bowl of warm water to soften the glue, and le...

•In MMD 000106 Tim Baxter mentions soaking the labels off old boxes to reglue them onto new boxes. (This response is late because I've been on holiday.) I try this quite often but it doesn't always work very well. Sadly for me, the most difficult labels to remove seem to be those on Aeolian boxes, p...

•Following John Phillips comments about removing roll labels I recall my recent experiences in this matter. My grandfather was an avid stamp collector and when I was young showed me how to remove stamps from their mailing envelopes. I guessed this would work equally well for removing roll labels fro...

•Mark Williamson asked in MMD 2002.08.16: > Does anyone know if many Salvation Army tunes were made into > organ cobs or any other mechanical music formats? The answer to Mark's question is "yes." I recently rediscovered a piano roll that I bought a few years ago, "Salvation Lassie of Mine" (Connori...

•The Babe Ruth piano story hits close to home. About a month ago a large piano warehouse had a disastrous fire. I have been offered anything left, gratis. So have others. Yesterday, I went over and looked through all the plates: a Baldwin 9-footer, several Bechstein and Steinway 7-plus-footers, and ...

•Don Winter wrote: > Yesterday, I went over and looked through all the plates: a Baldwin > 9-footer, several Bechstein and Steinway 7-plus-footers, and so forth. I think these plates would be perfect candidates for making large Aeolian harps (wind harps) or other sound sculptures or experimental ins...

•Well, I decided to run over to the fire and retrieve a keyboard shift lever I needed and they had scraped the place level, all those pianos gone! So no wind chimes no nothing. But they had a water damaged 9-footer. and believe me it was coming apart faster than I could imagine. I did ask for and re...

•[ Don Winter wrote in 021120 MMDigest: > Well, I decided to run over to the fire and retrieve a keyboard shift > lever I needed and they had scraped the place level ... I've re-read the back-issues of MMD preceding this one, but can't seem to determine where this fire was. Not all of us know where ...

•[ Richard Schneider asked the location of the fire. ] To answer the question fully, the company, D.C. Moore, was primarily a moving, storage and rental company that specialized in pianos. They used to have a small rebuilding shop but closed it down about 10 years ago and auctioned off about 100 pia...

•-- non-subscriber, please reply to sender and MMD -- Hello, I was on your homepage and read about the piano rolls. As I have a private Salvation Army Museum at Basel, Switzerland, I have some piano rolls in connection with the Salvation Army. Therefore I'd like to ask you whether you have recording...