There seems to have been more than the usual share of inquiries about
"do it myself" piano rebuilding.  I think an account of my experience
in this area may shed some light on this topic.

As background, I'm the sort of guy who can fix anything.  I've rebuilt
automobile engines, repaired every sort of vending machine, constructed
electric printed circuits, and built professional architectural models.
I maintain several Mills Violanos for clients, and I even built a house
or two, complete with plumbing and heating.  Generally, if it breaks,
and there's a book about it, I can fix it ... so I always thought.

So now I own a player piano, a Stroud Duo-Art that some craftsman rebuilt
with white (!) glue.  I went about reading all I could find about the
player action and piano, and set to work undoing the damage.  The whole
mystery of piano tuning seemed fascinating, and the books in print about
it seemed designed to confuse, so I sent for a $400 mail-order course.

Needless to say, you cannot learn to tune a piano by mail; yet you can
derive some basic understanding that can help you maintain your equipment,
at least to the point of getting it up to pitch.

The player action of the piano offered little challenge, short of removing
the *&#!!$% white glue and making new wooden parts.  The piano, on the
other hand, ... ...

After one late night round with whippens and hammers, I explained to the
dear Rosanne at morning coffee that _never in my entire life_ had any
mechanical thing given me so much trouble.  Pianos are made unlike
anything else in the world.  After all, there is no single other thing
that you can possibly find that is crafted of thousands of wooden and felt
parts held together with hide glue all in a manner that seems to make it
impossible to access anything.

To this very day, I can't understand how these things are manufactured
today in any sort of efficient manner.  To top it all off,  seemingly
every moving thing has an adjustment.  And most of the adjustments cannot
be made until the action is removed.  Do you get the picture?

Even something as simple as replacing a string really gave me a hard time.
The string wants to whip around, quite uncooperative, while you attempt to
kink it around the bottom and coil the top around the pin.  You would not
believe what grief a simple task like that can cause to a newcomer without
the experience or tools.

To sum it up, I finally got the thing together, and I am truly grateful
for not having done any damage to a nice instrument.  The repairs were
finished in a quality manner  after some hundreds of hours.  No, I never
learned to tune pianos.  I'll tune mine, but even that is a tiresome,
extremely difficult job that I could never consider to be properly done.

In the Long Island, New York, area, the guys who mow lawns earn about $15
per hour.  Piano technicians earn about $10 per hour.  I came away from
the entire adventure with a giant respect for a profession that is vastly
underpaid and unappreciated.  The problem here, of course, is finding a
piano tech who is truly professional and won't botch up a job with white
glue, strip screws, etc.   To the guys reading this who make their living
repairing pianos, I tip my hat; your skill is truly an art.

For the novice who wants to rebuild his own piano, I believe that with the
right research, a steady hand and devotion to perfection, the job can be
done.  But a good professional will, without any doubt, do a better job at
a _very_ reasonable hourly rate.  If you decide to do it yourself, be
prepared for a job that will have you shaking your head in disbelief of
how difficult a seemingly simple device can be to repair.

Ed Gloeggler, Long Beach, NY

( Jody, feel free to edit my longwinded thoughts, to save them
for another day, or simply to file them elsewhere.)

 [ Nay, Ed, it's a _wonderful_ letter, with hope for the newcomers
 [ and camaraderie for the "sadder but wiser".  It all rings true!
 [
 [ Robbie