This piano has become a bit of a pet project of mine. If you’ve been following my Instagram account you’ll have seen it in many pieces. I was given it for free, and you have to understand that the vast majority of pianos I get offered, whether to buy or for free, are really only suited for the skip, this one however, caught my eye. The first thing about it was that it was old. This should have turned me away, but I love old stuff, especially old musical instruments. The older the instrument the more problems it’s likely to have, but it also means it has history. This piano’s been through two world wars, it’s existed in three centuries, I think that makes it wonderful.
The second thing was that it was a Bechstein. Now, you do get rubbish Bechsteins but, generally speaking, they make good, solid pianos. I have come across some Bechstein uprights that I wouldn’t like to go near with a barge pole (and then had to sit down and tune them), but they’re the exceptions. What particularly makes a difference and was the thing which sealed the deal with this piano, was the stringing pattern and damper position.
You can see in this photo that there are two sections of strings. One larger section where the strings go down and slightly to the left, and a second section where they go diagonally down and right. This is called overstringing (because the strings go over each other) and makes a huge difference to the sound because it means that you can fit much longer strings into the piano without having to make it any bigger. All modern pianos are overstrung, but many, if not most, pianos from this era had their strings all going down in a straight line parallel to each other. They tend to sound awful.
What you can’t see very well in this photo are the dampers. Those are the bits which stop the strings from playing when you take your finger off the note. It’s a good thing to not be able to see the dampers, this means that this piano is an underdamper. If a piano is an overdamper then there is a series of wires in front of the hammers, connected to a rail going over the top of them which all the dampers hang off. It’s a really bad system and doesn’t work very well, but many, if not most, upright pianos from before the first world war had this system. Nobody makes them like that any more.
So this being a 19th century, overstrung, underdamped Bechstein meant that I just had to have it.
Then came the problems. I knew from the start that the action was going to need a complete rebuild. Most of the felts looked worn and manky and some of the hammers were flapping about every which-way when you tried to play them. That wasn’t a problem. I had ummed and ahhed (how on earth are you supposed to spell that expression) about whether it needed a restring when I took a precursory glance over it, but having tuned it and discovered semi-loose tuning pins I decided it would be for the best if I did. At this point, I took all the casework off and discovered cracks in the bridge.
This is a pretty serious problem, you can’t just leave cracks in the bridge. The bridge is what transfers most of the sound from the strings to the soundboard and faults in it can cause big issues with the sound of the piano. It’s a big job though. Cracks in the bridge is normally one of the things you would scrap a piano for. But I figured that that would be fine, I’d never done a bridge recap before and this would give me the opportunity to practice on a piano that doesn’t matter to anyone before a customer asks me to do it on their great-grandfather’s Steinway.
So, I got the strings off, took the frame out, and at this point found a couple more problems. Firstly, there were cracks in the soundboard. No problem, simple repair if you know what you’re doing. Secondly were the cracks in the wrest-plank. The wrest-plank is the lump of wood that all the tuning pins hammer into. Cracks in the wrest-planks are a serious problem and one of those things you would normally scrap a piano for.
At this point, you can probably tell that I am an idiot. Trying to persevere with this piano is a fool’s errand. It’s really only good for firewood at this point.
So follow me on Instagram (and I occasionally post stuff on YouTube too) where you can follow the story of this piano. I don’t get time for it very often, so it’s probably going to take quite a while to finish, but now I’ve committed myself to it you can be dang sure I’m going to follow it through until this piano plays like it was made yesterday.
Why do I do this to myself?