I have a German-built "Gotha" Steck 7'4" Pianola grand that can fairly
certainly be dated to the end of 1908 (which was the year that Edwin
Votey filed several patents covering the extended-case player grand).
It has exactly the same cast-iron keybed and massive construction that
Randolph Herr notes about his Weber.  I gather that other Gotha Steck
grands of this era have this iron keybed, so it was presumably a
standard design for 1908-1910 or thereabouts, subsequently abandoned
as unnecessary.

My Steck has an American-made four-deck stack divided to have two
pairs of decks with outwards-facing pneumatics that operate downwards,
with a splayed row of levers underneath the stack to convert this to an
upwards movement to operate the keys - a classic bit of tracker-organ
technology.  Indeed, the little brass pivots for these levers are
identical to those used in Aeolian pipe organs.  This type of stack is
illustrated in a service pamphlet published in the UK, but I'm not aware
of any other pianos fitted with it so it presumably was used for a very
short while until the more familiar 3-deck design prevailed.

Aeolian in the first decade of the 20th century spent a fortune
acquiring a number of companies, using the money invested by Frederic
Bourne, retired President of Singer sewing machines.  He put in several
million dollars (at 1900 prices) over a decade.  Part of the cash went
towards re-equipping the newly-acquired piano factories.

You can see this very clearly with the Gotha instruments.  The Gotha
factory was purchased from Ernst Munck, and stayed under that name for
about a year after Aeolian purchased it in 1905, after which it was
re-named Steck (but never 'George Steck').  The early Gotha Stecks are
beautifully built but quite lightweight pianos, typically half-plate
uprights with exposed pinblock.  By 1908 or so all this changes and you
start to see full-plate pianos, much bigger and more heavily built.

Somebody in the piano trade wrote to me after an earlier posting on
this general subject, with the observation that the large-model Gotha
upright had exactly the same string scale as an American Weber model.
This reinforced my feeling that Aeolian's Bourne-funded upgrading was
implemented world-wide in a tightly coordinated manner.  Hearing about
an American Weber with a cast-iron keybed rather reinforces that
viewpoint!

Julian Dyer