Thousand Dollar Supercar's old piano

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

On 05/03/2021 at 13:35, Thousand Dollar Supercar said:

 I'll happily start a piano Barry thread in 'Other Projects' and ramble on until you regret it.

Uh-oh, it's time.

This thread will be long and tedious and you probably shouldn't read it. Eventually there may be some videos but I need to bury them behind off-putting Barry stories. 

Four score and nineteen years ago, before the internet, computers, CDs, cassettes, before NZ switched to decimal currency, before TV, vinyl, WW2, the Great Depression, the popularisation of radio, before the majority of NZ families owned a car or even had electricity in the home, it was still the golden age of the piano. 

My great grandfather on my mother's side had just upgraded to a shiny new British piano (Japanese pianos weren't a thing yet, and German pianos had fallen out of favour in recent years for some reason). Somehow the receipt from that piano purchase survives to this day:

More recently we also unearthed this photo of Great Granddad playing said piano:

OK, so he's only "playing" the piano using a push-up pianola. These were a mechanical contraption that sat externally in front of the piano, somehow read scrolls of music via pneumatics and played the piano keys the same way a human would. A human was still required to power the device by pumping foot pedals, and then to take credit for the performance. They could also adjust things like volume and tempo on the fly via hand-operated sliders.

Here's a random photo of a push-up pianola being used with a grand piano:

When you think about it, this is a ridiculous amount of complexity, weight, cost, physical space, maintenance, effort etc just to reproduce music. 

Anyway, although using a pianola doesn't qualify one as a musician, my grandmother told me that Great Granddad would put a great deal of focus into adding expression via the pianola's levers. She recalled one instance where he finished a performance and heard applause coming from outside his window - someone walking down the street had stopped to listen.  That's it, that's the highlight of the first part of this piano's life. 

From there, the piano's life was presumably pretty standard - a lot of sitting in the corner. My great grandfather had six children and the piano wound up with his youngest, my grandmother. Possibly the earliest memories of my life are of visiting my grandparents' house, where the piano sat in a back room down the hall. I would go down there, bash on the keys randomly, come up with a convoluted name for my amazing impromptu composition, then head to the front room where the adults would be talking and try to get their attention: "Did you hear that? It was called... um....um...." (invariably I had forgotten the name of my composition by then)

The piano then passed to my parents while I was still young, possibly because my dad (who isn't from the piano's side of the family) showed some interest. Here's a top tip for any parents of young children: Tell the kid that if they go to bed early without any fuss like a good boy, their dad will play them a song on the piano as they fall asleep. This will mess them up for life. 

So I inherited the piano when I got my first house. Here it is at my place ten years ago, with a duvet jammed behind it:

It's a Marshall & Rose upright, made in London in 1922 (best guess based on the serial number). That manufacturing date should have given it long enough to take a slow boat to NZ prior to its purchase here in '24.

In car terms, you could liken this piano to something like a Rover P6 - an above-entry-level product, manufactured by a still-independent British company who would later be swallowed up by a conglomerate and produce less-unique products until the conglomerate went out of business for British reasons. Just as Rover would outsource the odd driveline component (a transmission here, an engine there), this piano uses a complete action assembly (the internal moving parts) from an outside supplier. The candleholders are aftermarket accessories which I added - basically they're the piano equivalent of fitting a roof rack and an external spare tyre to your P6 to make it look more 'classic car'.  The piano's finished in burr walnut veneer hidden under darkened old varnish. Believe it or not I cannot find another exactly the same online. 

My plans for this thread are:

1. to bore you all silly by rambling about piano stuff
2. to document my project to record ten songs to celebrate the centenary of the piano's purchase. I've picked one song from every decade of the piano's existence (judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into), and I plan to record one a month between January and October of 2024. Whether I find time to achieve this, let alone in video format, and whether I go through with making the results public, time will tell. The goal is that January will be the 1920s song, February the 1930s etc, and I will regret this very much. 

[sheepers]

you were right!

i shouldn't have read that. 

[Alfashark]

It's a slippery slope...

A friend of mine has a shed with 30 or 40 pianos in varying states of repair. 

[igor]

This is amazing. A one family owned survivor still in working order. How well does it hold a tune? 

[Stu]

Very cool! We have a Squire & Longson also made in London that looks very similar.

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

On 07/12/2023 at 06:38, sheepers said:

you were right!

i shouldn't have read that. 

Everything's going according to plan. 

On 07/12/2023 at 09:09, igor said:

This is amazing. A one family owned survivor still in working order. How well does it hold a tune? 

About as well as you'd expect! I had it tuned just last week and one or two strings slipped immediately. It's a big ask for a piano to survive nearly a hundred years in playable condition. Some selective refurbishment has been done, but the hammers and strings are original (save for the few I broke playing boogie woogie as a kid). Here's some of the stuff that's wrong:

1. The bass bridge (circled in the photo) is shearing/collapsing in the bichord (two strings per note) section, allowing the bridge pins to move under the sideways pressure from the strings, affecting the tone. See later photo.
2. Apparently the bass bridge has rolled, affecting the downbearing. The bridge is a cantilevered design, suspended in space and only attached to the soundboard at a point slightly closer to the soundboard's centre. This allows the bridge cap to be positioned closer to the bottom of the piano to maximise string speaking length, while having the string vibrations conducted into the soundboard at a more central point where the soundboard vibrates more freely. I think. The downside is that the bridge cap's not directly supported, so the cantilever can be crushed back against the soundboard under pressure from the strings, until the string downbearing is insufficient, affecting the tone again.
3. The pinblock is wearing / tuning pins are getting loose. Due to wear from being tuned and due to the wood aging, the tuning pins get looser in the pinblock over time and they don't hold their tuning as well. In my piano there's also no more scope to hammer the pins further in to make them grip better.
4. The hammers are wearing. See later photo. The felt hammers of a piano develop deep grooves over time from hitting the strings. It doesn't help if the felt is 99 years old. The felt gets compacted and hardened, and the contact point of the hammer gets flattened and enlarged, all of which affects the tone.
5. Various bushings in the action are wearing. The hammers wobble left and right and the piano clatters like a typewriter.
6. Some treble bridge pins are loose, creating false beats (an out-of-tune sound which can't be tuned away).

What's the fix for all of this?

1. Take all the strings off (to get at the bridges) and throw them away (because they're 99 years old, dull/oxidised/rusty, and would probably break during reinstallation)
2. Take the tuning pins out (because the strings are off) and throw them away (because the worn pinblock no longer grips pins of this size firmly enough)
3. Break the bridges off the soundboard
4. Make new bridges from scratch and stick them on
5. Install new larger tuning pins
6. Make and install new strings
7. Rebuild the action with new hammers

The fact that new strings and bridges would have to be custom made would mean there was an opportunity to get super nerdy  and redesign the piano using modern analysis and materials. Piano Barry warning. The scale design of a piano refers to the speaking lengths of the strings, their wire diameters, tensions, the copper wrapping of the bass strings etc.. Scale design is a mathematically complex task which probably took forever back in the day, but which now can be done more accurately with computer modelling. These days there is a greater selection of string wire thicknesses to choose from, and they've figured out the percentage of a wire's breaking strain which gives the best tone. So the impression I get is that they feed the piano's parameters into a computer and it corrects the homework of the original designers, allowing the piano to be rebuilt better, stronger and faster than new.

It'd only cost six million dollars a bit more than a new piano. 

Here's the bass bridge for "interest":

And here's some worn-out hammers for your viewing pleasure:

Sir Herbert Marshall would not approve:

The plan is to have the existing hammers reshaped early next year, along with giving them some new bushings to reduce the typewriter clatter. It'll be like polishing a rusty car / rearranging the seats on the Titanic. 

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

On 07/12/2023 at 06:56, Alfashark said:

It's a slippery slope...

A friend of mine has a shed with 30 or 40 pianos in varying states of repair. 

Does he wreck them for parts? I wouldn't mind a set of brass pedals to replace my silver-painted iron ones, and a rare circular keyhole surround (mine is lost and I've stuck a plastic fake brass one on, which protrudes too much). I know I could easily buy a $1 piano to get some brass pedals, but then I'd have to collect and dispose of the thing.

[Alfashark]

1 hour ago, Thousand Dollar Supercar said:

Does he wreck them for parts? I wouldn't mind a set of brass pedals to replace my silver-painted iron ones, and a rare circular keyhole surround (mine is lost and I've stuck a plastic fake brass one on, which protrudes too much). I know I could easily buy a $1 piano to get some brass pedals, but then I'd have to collect and dispose of the thing.

No, purely hoarding them - Despite all advice to do something with them.  Same goes for all of her bulldozers/hovercraft/heavy engineering equipment from the 30s to the 70s.

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

I'm behind schedule on this and I haven't posted anything because of no progress. 

I put the piano in the middle of the room and set up some microphones. I found that you could hear the rattling of these wire screens on the rear of the piano:

I took them off. The next problem was too much typewriter clatter from the piano's action when recording with the upper front panel removed. I know I should expect unwanted noise from something ancient, British and worn out, but the level of rattling was a bit much to be excused as character. With the upper front panel back in place, the mic doesn't pick up the clatter as much but I lose a bit of clarity.

So the technician took the whole action away to replace the bushings responsible for some of the clatter, and to reshape the hammer felt to remove the grooves and compacted areas.

I got the action back last week, but now it's a matter of working through which new bushings are too tight or too loose, fixing the already-broken bits we found, and fixing the newly-broken bits which resulted from working on something so old. So far the tone and the dynamic range are a bit better. An old piano like this is never going to set the world on fire, but I encountered four other old pianos over the course of Nats and they were all miles worse than mine. The bar is low. I have been tasked with playing the piano and making notes on what's still not right for the technician's next visit in April.

[ThePog]

I was given a John Broadwood a long time ago that was badly broken. My wife went to the UK for a month so I sat the action on the dining room table and slowly worked my way along it replacing springs and tape etc.

Getting the parts was hilarious as the man at the piano shop had a full on rant at me cos i asked if he also had a tuning key I could buy or borrow, he lost his shit and told me loudly and in the thickest Scottish accent that he had been fixing pianos for 40 years and what made me think I could do it in any way shape or form. I suggested that playing guitar for 20 years might have developed my ear for these things somewhat and he lost it so bad that he had to walk out. His boy was cracking up in the background and sold me all the parts I wanted once the old boy was gone. I didnt get a tuning key so jimmied one out of some square sockets in my socket set.

It was never spectacular but played and sounded pretty nice. Unfortunately I had to store it in a shitty shed for a few years and it got ruined again. So when my daughter had her 16th we had a piano smashing party and they laid into it with sledgehammers and axes while drunk. She has one friend who is an unusual girl but holy shit she could wield a sledgehammer.

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

2 hours ago, ThePog said:

...he lost his shit and told me loudly and in the thickest Scottish accent that...

"If ye don't tek yer meat, ye can't tune any piano! How can ye tune yer piano if ye don't tek yer meat?"

I have a tuning hammer that I bought online, and I could probably do an OK job with the aid of an app, but I'll save that for when I move out of Auckland to where there aren't any tuners. Until then, I know I cannae match fahrty yeers of expeerience in any wee, shepe or farrim.

Barglaralarrum. 

[ThePog]

Yea I tuned it by ear by comparing octaves on one string of each of the triplets, then listened to the interference pattern to tune the other two.

It wasnt in tune

[Nominal]

Heard this yesterday, need more piano tuners trained

Funds for more piano tuners and scaffolders, not primary teachers - agency | RNZ News

Also

'Piano Tuner' personalized number plates 'PN02NA' | Trade Me Motors

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

Interesting.

Quote

The tertiary education funding body is willing to subsidise more trainees in ... piano tuning, but doesn't want to pay for any increase in student numbers for primary teaching.
...the commission wanted to get value ......organisations had to prove they were good at ... retaining their ... trainees

A guy from my industry randomly decided to retrain as a primary school teacher, but he didn't last long in the field. I used to flat with a primary teacher years ago, and I remember her making strong vodka jellies to take to school and share around the staffroom at lunchtime - presumably those helped the teachers get through the day. 

Quote

David Jenkin from the Piano Tuners Guild said there were about 60 or 70 piano tuners and many were already beyond retirement age.

"We need it because piano tuners are getting old, they're dying off, there are currently not enough of them...

Jenkin said the shortage of qualified tuners was causing problems.

"Concerts start falling over ... you occasionally see reference in the media, a good local pianist turns up and there's a big stink because the piano is terrible.

I had David Jenkin assess my piano years ago. I found it interesting and I was sorely tempted to throw money away on a rebuild, but instead I bought a new piano for some reason. Now I have two pianos, because of course I can't get rid of the old one. 
More than a decade ago I was already finding it difficult to book piano tuners - they were busy, which meant they would tell me their one and only available time slot a month or two in the future, and I'd have to make that work. Then they'd decide to specialise in tuning expensive Steinway grands and stop accepting jobs for old British uprights.  The piano tuner I use now is someone I was forcibly transferred to when my previous tuner basically said he was too busy. She's not the norm for the industry as she's about a decade younger than me. 

She was able to bring forward her return visit to finish the hammer bushing replacement to earlier this week. So that work is mostly done now, but it has an annoying short-term downside - as Tim Finn would say, what I need is a positive action, but there's a fraction too much friction. 

Ooo, and I noticed this written on the back of the action:

I think it says "Palmer. 15th afternoon Recentre Ease Regulate". Palmer was my great grandfather's last name, and ironically he must have been getting the same work done to the action as I've just had done.

[igor]

19 hours ago, Nominal said:

Heard this yesterday, need more piano tuners trained

Funds for more piano tuners and scaffolders, not primary teachers - agency | RNZ News

This part of the article is a little concerning.

The Tertiary Education Commission has told polytechnics and universities to lift their pass rates.

.I hope it means they have to teach their material better rather than just letting the failing students pass anyway.