Greetings all, especially those  of you sweating out an impending
Gulbransen glued-stack rebuild :). You might want to file this under
"things Reblitz never told me".

Gulbransen's ARE difficult to rebuild. The glued-stack ones are really
tough, but even the screwed-stacks are no piece of cake. Every time I
do one of these I find myself thinking "You know, I could be working on
a Standard, or a Pratt-Read, or an Aeolian, or even an Autopiano right
now instead of THIS"! And in the case of the glued-stack, you get only
one chance to get it right. If you choose to cut it apart and make a
mistake, YOU'RE DEAD! And even if you do succeed in cutting it apart,
your restoration has to be near perfect, or it's simply not going to
work well. There's little room for error, especially considering the
small size of the bellows system. Check out a Gulbransen bellows system:
It's so small that you have enough room down there for a whole case of
Excedrin (which you'll probably be needing!). Now check out a Standard
action or Autopiano bellows system. BIG Difference, huh? BTW just in
case you're considering it, it IS cheating to replace the original Gul-
bransen bellows with a Standard action bellows, in the hopes that the
player will then work better! :) Lastly, consider this: suppose you do
cut the stack apart (or soak it apart), rebuild it and get everything
working perfectly. Your customer is delighted. Two months later, however,
he calls saying that he has a MINOR problem. You get there and discover
that a note in the middle of the piano is ciphering, or playing all the
time because a little piece of dirt has found it's way under the valve,
and the only way to fix it is to pop the valve cover and remove the valve
to get to the dirt. How do you access the valve, if it's on the second
or third tier? All of which leads you to the inevitable conclusion: There
HAS to be an easier way. There is. Read on.

Gulbransen used to provide a ten year warranty with their players. If
a problem developed with a glued-stack action, the owner ( or his tech-
nician) was instructed to send the entire stack back to Gulbransen, and
in turn, they sent an entirely NEW STACK back to you. (Even they didn't
try to rebuild the old one!). Pretty neat, huh! In the mid-twenties even
Gulbransen decided that there's got to be an easier and less expensive way
and so they switched BACK to a screwed stack (which they had used in their
earliest instruments. Now, if you had a problem with your stack and returned
it to Gulbransen, they only had to replace the offending parts and return the
original stack to you, rather than a new one. They saved big bucks that way!
What about someone who bought a glued-stack Gulbransen in say 1923 and five
years later developed a problem and returned it to Gulbransen for repair.
Well-- now get this-- since Gulbransen was no longer making glued stacks
they returned a SCREWED-STACK in it's place. That's right, the stacks were
interchangeable! Get the picture?

My recommendation, therefor, if you're faced with having to rebuild a
glued-stack Gulbransen, is to find an easier-to-rebuild and service screw-
ed stack and substitute it for the original!!!! The biggest difference is
that the glued-stack will have 88 pneumatics and the screwed-stack will
only have 80. Where does one get an orphan Gulbransen screwed-stack? Well
I get several calls a year from people either selling old players cheap,
or sometimes giving them away for free. I always go to look at such instru-
ments. Frequently I wind up giving the owners a few dollars for the player
parts alone and in this manner have acquired numerous orphan player actions.
Actually if you're faced with rebuilding a glued-stack action, you might
want to consider buying an entire screwed-stack Gulbransen if you can get
it cheap enough, just for the action alone. Make the substitution in the
piano you're getting paid to rebuild, and then sell the parts piano as just
a regular piano. Now why didn't Art tell you that in his book?

Les Smith¶
lessmith@buffnet.net