Antique Piano Repurposing

I'm so excited to tell you about this project/s that we have been working on!!! First, though, I need to start with a bit of a story.  A friend of ours was giving away this beautiful piano, I thought it would be great to have a second piano in my piano studio for lessons.  Overall it was in pretty good shape but we knew that it needed a little bit of work and we were OK with doing a few things ourselves to fix it.  We rented a truck and moved it into our house (and that short sentence does the fun of piano moving NO justice at all!)  A couple of days later our piano tuner was over to tune the other piano and he checked out the new one a bit more in depth with us (well really A LOT more in depth.)  He pointed out that the sound board and all of the string bridges were cracking.  His explanation really made it obvious why this is typically a death sentence for a piano as you have to dismantle the piano to repair/replace those elements.  He also said that the piano was over 100 years old and that tuning the piano might be a bit more difficult and there was a good possibility that the strings and/or the bridges might break in the process.  The action also needed a near-complete overhaul.  He told us that to fully fix it it would be upwards of $8000 (even more) and we could tune it and possibly play on it for another few years but once the bridges completely break (assuming they didn't during tuning) then it would be back to spending more to fix it.  We thought about it and decided that we wanted to really enjoy this beautiful piano but we wanted give it life in another way and we had a few ideas in mind. 

The first item of business was to take it apart, but in a way that it would still serve the ideas that we had.   At times that made things tricky.

We removed the front panels, keyboard lid and music stand, that was the easy part as it entailed popping out just a few screws.  The piano collected a lot of dust over the years and vacuuming out the inside of a piano isn't something that is really done often (though after seeing this I've decided it should be.)  As were taking it apart there were many times we had to stop and vacuum out the dust....and dead spiders. 

Next up we removed the action.  The action is home to the hammers and all the parts that cause them to hit the strings.  It's really quite an elaborate and ingenious set up.   Surprisingly, removing it was fairly easy as actions are usually only held in place by three or four screws.  This one had four and once they were removed it lifted out quite easily.

After removing the action the next item up was the strings.  Now you have to do this carefully because there is a lot of tension on them and you don't want one to snap and hit you (read: safety glasses and gloves!!)  Usually a special tuning device is used to turn the pegs the strings are on and of course we didn't have one.  This simply meant trying various metric and standard sockets until we found one that fit snug enough to loosen them.  We turned each peg until the string was released from all the tension and then popped the string's end off the bolt. Next came the fun part of removing them from the piano.  As a side note, the entire time I was doing this part I was singing out loud and in my head "past the point of no return!!"

Action and all strings GONE!

The keys were easy to remove as they lift right out and these were in great shape considering their age.  Now removing the "harp" (the big heavy metal part) of the piano was hard since it had been screwed into the sound board for 100+ years and the screws they used were quite large.   Getting them out entailed finding a tight fitting phillips-head screwdriver and then applying a very firm and steady force so that it was enough to get it moving but not strip the head out.  Some of them were also in very awkward positions where getting a screw driving in place was almost impossible.  My husband ended up having to drill out some of the screws because they wouldn't budge and stripped out.  We also moved the piano out to the garage at this point because we were going to do some cutting (the two of us moved it....more piano-moving fun!!)

Out in the garage, keys off and ready for the next phase.

 Next we popped off the top (which will be saved for something in the future).  Once that was done it sat ready for more tear-down and repurposing!  Stay tuned for the first project that came from this!!