•This is a rundown of the most-encountered player actions that I would consider easy or hard, starting with 1 as the easiest to rebuild and going up from there to the hardest. 1. Cable Euphona Inner-Player 2. Aeolian, non-reproducing 3. Standard action 4. Gulbransen screwed stack 5. Steger 6. Wurlit...

•[ Ref. Luke Myers in 160509 MMDigest ] Interesting list, Luke. I think you'd best say "in general..." as there are many variables involved, and one big one is the climate the player action has been subjected to. For instance, I once did a M. Schulz action that had been in high enough humidity that ...

•William "Bill" Prichard, of Princeton, Missouri, a talented local player piano restorer and collector, passed away in the early hours of Saturday morning, the 14th of May. Bill was a specialist at restoring M. Schulz pouch valves and had a rare talent for the Schulz players. He was also noted for h...

•As a rebuilder of player pianos of over 50 years, I have to put in my 2 cents worth about cheap player pianos. There are some cheap ones out there and I have seen them all. Granted, the Steinways, Duo-Arts and all the high end players may be the Cadillacs or Chevys of player pianos, but there's one...

•For sale, free, from the Ralph Schultz collection: a roll frame from an Auto-typist machine made by American Automatic Typewriter Co. This description is from Art Reblitz's files: "When Seeburg/Western Electric went out of business, they sold the Western Electric piano Selectra mechanism rights to ...

•Steven and MMD, I too built an O-roll player orchestrion in the 1970s, or in my case, I started it then. Like Fritz Gellerman put it, "It is still one of my favorite instruments." My orchestrion was built on the base of a Stroud "Metro-Style Themodist" player piano. It had been a failed restoration...

•Subtitle: Other Machines Which 'Play' Perforated Rolls In 1974, in order to stimulate business, I began to advertise using the phrase, "If it works with a perforated roll, we can fix it." I had only mechanical music in mind when I did that, but it brought some pleasant and rewarding surprises. The ...

•Chris Taylor wrote: > The older Aeolian pianos were not too bad, but in the later years > they just seemed to go from bad to worst. I guess in my opinion > they took the name Aeolian right down the tubes. That is a major understatement. Back when I was actively restoring players, the old Aeolians w...

•Greetings, all! I'd like to add yet another perspective to the old vs. new piano raillery going on. Even cheaply-made old grands can surprise you ! Three years ago, I was asked to resurrect a very, very battered H. C. Bay 5-foot grand which had sentimental value for its owner. This sad little instr...

•Hi there, This will be short, as I'm camping on a remote lake in Maine, running e-mail on our cell 'phone setup (at 2400 bps modem speed). (I just "do" standard e-mail when on the road ... while avoiding URLs and/or URL-mail (Hotmail, WebMail etc.) due to the air time costs and slowness of the syst...

•Bob Lloyd wrote [000321 MMDigest], "What were they designed to play on?" An Aeolian Themodist-Metrostyle piano, of course! These pianos had a greatly simplified version of the Duo-Art mechanism. It has the "snake-bite" holes in the tracker bar and the split stack, the same as a Duo-Art, but does no...

•My building is going to be getting a gut rehab. They are spending millions on it. I now have to MOVE! Please help! If you ever wanted a player piano from me now is the time to act. I do not want to move and store all of these. I would like to ship you as many as you can rebuild in the next five yea...

•I recently came across a Vogel player piano, and although I have been advised not to buy it (as I already have two players needing work and limited space and spare time and the fact that the piano action needs considerable work), I am always interested in increasing my knowledge of player pianos. W...

•Greetings to all! I am selling my collection of Welte-Mignon T-100 rolls. It comprises some 330 titles, give or take a few. To make a very long story short, I assembled what I have over a period of about forty years. Contained within the assortment are many nice things: Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, e...

•Dear John, Your player mechanism is a Steger or Artemis system, manufactured by the Steger Piano Company in Steger, Illinois, and Chicago. An interesting system, that is their early production model, with screw-on pneumatics and pendulum-style valves that hang from a piece of zephyr skin. The valve...

•The motor governor in a Baldwin is a tricky little devil. Here are a few things to watch out for. If these things get just a tiny bit of dirt in them, it will slow the motor down. The first inclination is to readjust the threaded rod. Don't! It will throw the slow speed off, and the governor will b...

•Hi all, Randolph Herr recently wrote about piano roll artists changing piano pieces when they were recording a roll label. There are two pieces that come immediately to mind for me. The first that comes to mind is the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodie #2 that was recorded by Alfred Cortot for Hupfeld and t...

•Clearly it's all down to personal taste, but to add my suggestions to those already made (every one of which I agree with!), some of my favourite classical material on Duo-Art is: 6365 Chopin's Andante Spianato & Polonaise, played by Alfred Cortot 6441 Schubert's Rosamonde Impromptu, played by Alfr...

•To Andy Millard and the MMDer's, regarding the strange stack in the Kranich & Bach Welte for sale in Connecticut [090415 MMDigest] -- please rescue and restore this piano! Gee, I wish this piano wasn't sitting on the other side of the country from where I am in Seattle or I'd be there now. (I'll gi...

•Art Reblitz and I are continuing our search through archives, catalogues, and the like in connection with the book we are writing about coin-operated pianos, orchestrions, and related instruments sold in America. Questions of the day: Does anyone have information as to Eberhardt coin pianos or othe...