Piano Horror Stories
By Bill Maxim
My hat's off to you who had the wisdom to say "thanks, but no thanks!" to the offer of pianos in such awful shape. I wish I had always been that smart. I was called once to tune a piano with the name "Krell Pian-Auto" on the fallboard. The piano seemed well-made and in decent shape, but the player action had been removed.
Subsequently I received a call from the customer to restore the player action, which had been stored separately -- as it turned out, in a chicken coop somewhere. All the broken parts needing repair and other deterioration should have warned me, but I plugged doggedly on. I became slowly aware that I was also battling a poorly designed mechanism in such things as valve guides (lack of them) and leather valve seats (against leather valve facing). Somehow, I got the thing to play, but each roll requires furious pumping to get the player to start (Reblitz makes the same note about the Krell Artemis).
The client, an attorney, never complained about the result, but every time I think of it, it makes my skin 'Krell.'
Bill Maxim, RPT
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(Message sent Thu 19 Dec 1996, 07:25:25 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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