Jon Page luckily corrected a slightly misguided piano shopper in regard
to finding a good player piano, and I certainly agree with him.
Soundboard flaws are easy to fix, and the only thing you need to worry
about are sympathetic buzzes caused by loose ribs.

If you are fixing just a few of these in an old upright and can't seem
to get to them behind the supports, Sherwin Williams sells a clear
epoxy that sets as hard as hot hide glue will. Make you some thin
wedges or use putty knives as spreaders, and a length of furnace tape
that can be slipped behind the support posts and used to seal under
each hidden part of the loose rib (so the epoxy won't run out and down
the board). Now, using something like a piece of flashing bent at a
right angle like a thin, flexible piece of "angle iron" pour the epoxy
into it and let it run down into the crack. Pull out the putty knives,
wipe off the glue that squeezed out with a lacquer thinner rag, peel
off the tape and clean under it by pushing the rag through with a
stick, and you're done.

If you have a lot to fix, don't do your fixing first between supports
and then try to get behind them. Start at the top rib and fix it all
the way down. Then take the next rib underneath that one and go all the
way diagonally across the piano, and so forth.

Now this is very important! In 99% of the cases in which the soundboard
has dried out, the bass bridge joint is actually broken and is held on
mainly by its three screws through the soundboard. In more cases than
not, this causes an upright piano to sound very "tubby" and the bass
has added to it a "thump" sound (to a sensitive ear, that is). Also,
the piano will never have a bright, crisp, clear tone anywhere in it
because the development of timbre relies on the bass strings and their
sensitivity to resonate with the other strings in the piano (that's why
the call the bass section the "foundation"). You have to take the bass
bridge and cantilever off the soundboard, fix it all up, and replace
it, and sometimes that is hard to do because of inaccessible screws,
but you'll figure it out!

In one piano, I drilled a 3/8" dia hole through a back support in order
to get to a screw head, then after replacing the bridge and screwing
everything back tight again, I doweled the hole, using hot hide glue
for everything.

Just a final note about soundboard glue: Never use carpenter glues for
soundboard work. They are elastic, which means their joints creep over
time and they do not conduct sound very well at all, deadening a
soundboard, they dry by water evaporation first, which means they will
never be strong in a situation where they cannot be clamped, and worst
of all, they cannot be removed (to my knowledge) and fixed right. They
are the worst kind of glue that man has ever come up with for piano
work. I cannot think of a time when I would ever, in my wildest
nightmare, use yellow carpenter glues. They don't even repair chairs
very well! (I figure they are for carpenters to stick things up long
enough to allow them to get out of the house, when they just can't
figure any other way to do it. Do you suppose?).

Any glue that is elastic and relies strictly on a mechanical bond with
wood (like carpenter glues) cannot take even a little continual tension
without eventually breaking, because the constant tension keeps
stretching it each day just a little until finally you can see the
joint. And nothing likes to test a joint's mettle better than a large
expanse of wood! Not to mention little things like chair rungs, etc.
And the bad thing is, once applied, you cannot rectify the mistake
later. You ruined it! So please, please! Do not get out your bottle of
carpenter glue with the handy spout and begin squirting.  Somebody one
day might actually like to have heard that piano sound the way it did
when it came from the factory, and after you've ruined it, they will
never again hear its tones as it could have produced. Use hot hide glue
primarily for everything you can. It produces a chemical (and
mechanical) bond with wood and dries hard. It is re-fixable, it is
invisible, it is stronger in wood than carpenter glue, and it conducts
sound perfectly-- all frequencies and effects, and when used correctly
will last for generations, not "probably ten years."

Craig B.