Hello MMD.  In 1972 I bought my first pianola, an Aeolian Stroud.
After a few months I dawned on me that it wasn't playing as well as it
might and I took myself off to the local public library, in the forlorn
hope that I might find a book on player pianos.  To my great surprise
I found a copy of "Player Piano" by Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume (I love
writing that name), and I spent a weekend glued to it.

I soon realized that my suspicions were well-founded -- the player did
need a rebuild.  This was very scary, but two things gave me some
courage.  One was that the book has a set of photos of the rebuilding
of a player action and the action illustrated is an Aeolian.

The second was Ord-Hume's diagram of how the tracking ears work.  It
just did not make sense to me.  I began to think that the diagram was
wrong, so I made up a water manometer to check it and found that
a vacuum line and an air line were indeed interchanged by mistake in
the drawing.

I decided that if I could work that out I might be able to do a
rebuild, but I still clearly remember the slightly sick feeling that
accompanied my cracking off the first striking pneumatic.  Halfway
through the rebuild we moved house, and my wife, Beryl, will gladly
tell you that I moved the pianola, which was still in a million bits,
and she moved everything else.  I did use PVC-E glue, which I wouldn't
these days, but thirty-six years later that player is still going well.
Since then I have rebuilt an electric Gulbransen Recordo and an Aeolian
65-note pushup and now I'm working on my Steck Half D-A.

The point about the above rigmarole is that thirty years ago all I had
to go on was Ord-Hume's book and some snippets of advice in Durrell
Armstrong's P.P.Co. catalog.  Today, my hinge query has elicited four
immediate responses, all different and all very useful.

Where would I, at the ends of the earth, be without MMD?  I should add
that Tasmania is civilized and very beautiful.  Think seriously about
including it in your itinerary if you visit Australia.

John Phillips - in Hobart, Tasmania