a long overdue update

I can't believe it's been nearly 6 years since my last post. 

A lot has happened in this time; mainly I've switched from working in a guitar shop to working in a piano shop. Leonard Shapiro Guitar Repair had been sharing shop space in Wells Pianos' warehouse building. There were occasionally slow spells in the guitar repair business; we were a very small-scale shop. During one such slow time I was basically at the point of needing a second source of income. Kieran, the owner of Wells Pianos, noticed me job hunting one day, snatched me up, and dragged me into the darkside.

I worked at both shops for almost 2 years until the building we were in got sold and we all got kicked out. Leonard closed down the shop at that point and I began building up the shop space at Wells' actual store location.

I started out by learning to string and have moved up to doing complete rebuilds. This involves replacing the pinblock, soundboard, keytops, bridge caps, and then re-stringing. 
I mostly taught myself everything as I went and more or less had to build all the fixtures, jigs, and tools for doing each part of the job. 
Here is the soundboard press being built, and behind it is the soundboard drying box. The spruce panels and all of the brace wood I make the boards out of is stored in there to lower the moisture content of the wood. On the right are clamping cauls for gluing the board into the piano.

So I'll kind of go through my rebuild process; I don't have pictures of each step so I'll need to brush past some details for now.

I start by removing the old strings and tuning pins, then hoisting out the cast iron plate.

The first part to get replaced is the pinblock. Here a new block is already installed and the soundboard has been removed.

Next the braces (or ribs as they are called in the piano world; soundboards are called bellies) are cut to rough shape and radiused on the top side. Then they are fit into pockets on the rim of the piano frame.

After the ribs are fit flush to the rim, the board blank is cut to rough outline and fit snugly into the piano. The rib locations are marked to the underside of the board where they will get glued.

The ribs get glued on in a giant go-bar press. The gluing platform is dished out with a crazy compound radius. On the right you can see the arch against the bottom of the straight-edge laid in front of a rib being glued in.

I made a rib-shaping plane from a wooden Russian hand plane I found in a thrift store.

After planing the ribs down, the bridges (which have been re-capped with maple) get located then glued onto the board. The bridges get clamped by screwing them down through the ribs.

Once the glue is dry the screwholes are plugged with dowels. Other dowels also get drilled into the bridge between the ribs. Those are glued in with maple caps.

The underside of the completed soundboard. Now it will get masked over the gluing surface around the edge, then shellacked.

Now the board gets glued into the piano using lots of clamps and the cauls I showed before.

 The soundboard is installed. Holes for the plate bolts get drilled out and the plate is set to its correct height. The plate height determines the final height of the bridges in order to get the proper string angle. 

Here they are starting to get notched out for measuring.

The bridge caps are planed down to final height and then the pin holes are located and drilled.  

Graphite paint is applied to the caps as a string lubricant.

Now comes my favorite part, the bridge notching. I carve out a scoop in front of each set of pin holes. These are the tools I use.

The bridge pins get hammered in and the tops are filed flush much like leveling guitar frets with a file.

Quarter-round is glued in along the bass side of the board along with some other trim pieces.

Now the plate is at last ready to be bolted in and the piano can get restrung.

So, as you can see, I have done quite a few of these rebuilds already. Here are my old soundboard and pinblock collections. And yes, I'm saving all that finely-aged soundboard spruce to use in future guitar-sized builds!

At some point during the rebuilding process I also most often need to replace the old keytop ivory (or plastic in some cases) with new synthetic ivory. First the old tops and fronts are removed.

 The new tops are glued on using clamping decks I made from spare clipboard clips. New fronts get glued on too.

I shape and polish the new keytops by hand. That is my least favorite part. Here the keys on the left are done.

After all that I pretty much hand the piano over to the techs who rebuild the "action", which is the actual playing mechanism such as the hammers and dampers. The action and keys are installed and adjusted and the piano gets tuned to pitch.

So that's what I've been up to for the last six years or so. I also bought a house with my girlfriend last year and that has been keeping me extremely busy as well.

 

I intend to start posting more regularly as things have suddenly slowed down a bit at the piano shop. Plus I have many more instruments I need to show off! Thanks for checking in, and I hope you're all doing ok out there.