•I am writing all of this off the top of my head, and I know that I am making a few mistakes, but bear with me -- it has been sixteen years or more since I saw all of this, and believe it or not, this is the first time I have related it to anyone outside my shop. When you have a plant the size of th...

•More "O" roll notes: When the "O" roll plays it generally only plays one solo instrument at a time. I don't remember ever having a roll that plays both solo instruments at the same time. I only have one Coinola with two solo instruments and that is a Coinola "K" cabinet model with two ranks of pipe...

•I trust that when you have restored 100 more pianos things will make a lot more sense to you. I agree that a piano with ALL that stuff missing would be one I would have trashed for parts as well. It sounded to us that you had taken 3 or 4 borderline chicken coop pianos and had merged them into one ...

•Bruce Clark's posting on Tempo Problems in Spliced Medley Rolls (980421) and more recently Harvey Chao's comments on a mis-punched QRS roll (980525) and finally Tim Baxter's Maximum Notes-Per-Second on Piano Roll (980528) have spurred me into posing the following question for the wise men of the MM...

•Hi All, I need a general consensus from the group of professional piano rebuilders. Here's the situation: I was called in to evaluate the condition of an Aeolian Duo-Art grand that was 'completely restored' three years ago. Upon looking at the unit, my immediate response was, "This unit was not res...

•I have been hesitant to enter into this discussion. The last time I took part in the MMD about my band organ music on a vintage phono- graph recording, I got clobbered for days on end from far and wide. Thankfully I was vindicated in the end. Time period 1958 to 1960. In a music store in Smiths Fal...

•As far as we know, no Steck pianos were made in Britain until after WW1, when heavy duties were applied to German imports. Before the war 'European' Stecks were made at the Gotha factory of Ernst Munck, which Aeolian took over around 1904. Extremely fine instruments, Gotha Stecks are very similar t...

•Hi all, After reading the Digests of the last two days, I had throw in another two cents. First of all, Roy Ulrich, in Virginia City, MN must have a better rapport with Schmitt's than I do [MMDigest 990116]. Kudos to you, Roy! I did have a small tiff over a junk piano being pushed on one of my cust...

•Based on no scientific measurements -- but hauling lots of pianos and reed organs out of unheated storage areas (garages, wash houses, unused out houses, etc.) and having to store some of my own inventory in unheated areas in east central Illinois -- I have concluded the following: The big problem ...

•Dear Robbie, Following your call for direct witnesses, I can certify that there was a total solar eclipse last Wednesday. By going to a remote small village 100 km north of Paris (exactly 20 km north of Beauvais), I was lucky enough to avoid most of the traffic jam (it took many people 4 hours to c...

•Re: 990913 MMDigest) In-Reply-To: Damon Atchison was given some 65-note rolls and says: > I have heard another MMDer refer to them as being > good for wallpaper. I have never seen a 65-note player piano and I've > seen almost everything roll-operated except an Art-Echo or Apollo. > > Are these roll...

•G'day all, This is a topic which has been debated many times in the past but I believe it is so important that it deserves to be updated regularly. I totally agree with Mark Reinhart's comments and would like to add that because such small amounts are used, the cost saved by using general purpose t...

•I, too, prefer the use of archival acid-free tape over 3M(TM) Magic Tape. Archival tape was originally intended for rare, irreplaceable documents. Don't paper music rolls fall into the same category? Besides the properties mentioned by Mark Reinhart, archival tape is lighter weight than 3M Magic Ta...

•All Reed organ pipes have a vibrating reed which controls the sound produced. The vibrating reed is usually made of soft brass. The vibrating reed is necessarily tuned to approximate in pitch the inner sympathy of the air mass in it's resonator. The length of the vibrating portion of the reed is ch...

•John Tuttle's question in the MMD for 000205 about the length of time it takes to manufacture a piano prompts this response. Different manufacturers used different methods of "construction". At Wurlitzer, the Holly Springs, Mississippi plant, the back of the piano was constructed, strung, chipped a...

•Regarding Charles Hildebrant's question about the bleeds in the treble octave of a Seeburg E stack. The bleed is equivalent to a tiny hole in the pouch itself. The rule is: * If a bleed is too big, the note won't play. (The pouch doesn't have enough power to lift the valve. A hole in the pouch has ...

•Hi, It will probably take quite a while before I have the time to start working on my Steck Duo-Art player (except for replacing tubing). Meanwhile, I've picked up piano lessons again and I'd like to have the piano itself repaired, cleaned, adjusted, tuned, etc., by a technician. However, there's o...

•Many very well cast piano plates (frames) here in Europe seem not to have been filled, just primed, before gilding, but the filler of choice certainly before WW1 seems to have been gesso (pronounced jess-oh), the same gesso used since time immemorial as the ground for classic English water-gilding ...

•I detect some noses in the air and feel compelled to respond. Although I am a neophyte in the area of mechanical music, I have used RTV, hot glue, hide glue and wood glue for various projects, both professional and amateur over the years, so I thought I would put my two cents worth in. I would thin...

•Hi, So digging a bit further into the guts of the Steck (UK) Pedal Electric Duo-Art piano I made the following discoveries : There is a crack in the soundboard. Well, it's actually the opposite. There is no space, but it looks like the soundboard didn't crack because of shrinking, but because it ha...