After the external inspection, it was time to see what the inside was like - and how bad it really was...
Now, before I go further, I have to confess to a dark, secret fantasy I have harbored most of my life. By now, it's obvious that I love old things. But there's a reason... Old things might - possibly - if you're lucky - contain old valuable things. You know, things that may have gotten dropped down some crack or crevice, forgotten, unable to be retrieved, whatever - but still there.
Take an old house, for example. One of my dreams - buy it, rip it apart, and (secret fantasy) find something cool, if not valuable hidden in the walls, under a stone, beneath a floor, in the attic, wherever. Or one of those stone fences in New England that I grew up with - you can't tell me that some farmer, traveller, fortune hider didn't lose something, drop something, hide something in one those. All you have to do is take apart - and have some patience.
So, here I am with a late nineteenth century piano. And I'm about to take it apart.
First surprise. Outside of the screws that hold the candle holders to the frame and a couple of internal screws holding a rail or two in place, that AREN'T any screws. Or nails. Or glue. Or anything else that actually requires a tool to dissemble most of the major external, and a lot of the internal, parts. Zero. Nothing.
Damn, now if I knew THAT to start with, this thing would have been in pieces when we put it the truck and would have weight about 2/3 of what it did.
I started with the candle holders... Eight screws, and they were off:
Next came the music stand. Another two screws and it was off:
Then the final sets of screws, holding the top lid of the piano to the body. And that was it for hardware and the need for tools for anything external. I will say this for the craftsmen of the era - they knew what they were doing.
Two sliding latches and the bottom panel covering the lower harp lifted up and out. Once the top lid was off (and it really didn't need to be taken all the way off if I hadn't wanted it off, just lifted up) and two more latches and the top panel covering the upper harp was off.
The key cover just lifted off once the upper and lower panels were removed. Within five minutes, and if I didn't want to remove the "hardware" parts - candle holders, music stand, and top lid - with no tools, I have just removed most of the major exterior components.
Now for the kicker - and the reason why the left leg falls out when you lift the piano and the right leg is wobbly at best... Like everything else, there is no hardware or glue holding these in place - the top of each leg is basically a big wooden screw (carved into and a part of the leg) that screws into the base of the key bed. Unfortunately, I haven't taken a picture of the screw part yet - I'll post that when I get to the fixing of it - but you'll get the idea here, I think:
Well, maybe not, but it's the best picture I have right now. The issue is that the left screw is pretty much entirely stripped and the right screw is not much better. If they were in better condition, you just unscrew and remove. In this case, you just lift and let fall.
Finally, we're down to the keys. And the final two screws... Internal to the piano. Remove those and the rail that retains the keys come off. In the grand scheme of things, if I needed a screwdriver at all to get at the real guts of this thing, this is the only place where it was an absolute necessity.
With the rail gone, the keys just lift off - carefully, of course, They're not directly connected to the action, but a bit of care is need to ensure you don't damage the action when you remove them.
And, again, this where I started paying attention to detail and noticing the attention to detail that the craftsmen who made this piano paid so long ago. Not having dismantled that many pianos - and nothing more recent than something made 50-60 years ago, maybe all pianos are made and marked this way. Somehow, I think not.
Each key is numbered up near the top of the key, where it attaches to the action. Which means that even if I were not careful enough to keep them in order, all I have to do is read the numbers to put them back in the correct order.
And, perhaps more interesting (to me, at least), is that each key is individually made and specific to its location in relation to its neighbor keys... I wouldn't go so far as to they were hand-carved (although possible), but each key is unique. The notch of the key below is not the same width of other keys with the same notch orientation.
And then I took a better look at the harp and the strings. Not only are the keys individually numbered, but each of the pegs is labeled with string name.
So this is all well and good - and interesting from a construction and detail perspective - but I've now exposed the internal guts of this thing. The good news - I don't see anything that's outrageously broken or in any state of disrepair beyond what you'd expect. The bad news - where is the TREASURE? Where's the cool stuff that got lost? The coin, the piece of jewelry?? I didn't buy the piano for that, to be sure - but still! There's the whole fantasy thing going on here.
But, for now, everything is off except the frame, the harp, and the action - upper and lower. Nothing looks really bad, but everything looks incredibly dirty. You can guess what the next step will be...
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