About a month ago I was able to add a 1974 Wurlitzer spinet to our growing inventory of pianos to be restored. This piano had been bought by a gentleman in Clarksville but who now needed it removed as he was preparing to move, so we went to pick it up. There was a lot of cleaning, shining, regulation, and especially tuning to be done to it, and I'd love to show you a bit of the process! Below is a video of my sister playing a beautiful piece on it before I had gotten the chance to really dig deep into the work this piano would need.
This piano took me about 19 hours to complete, across multiple days. There were a lot of client actions that needed some love as well as some tunings, so it took me a little longer than expected to finish. After acquiring the piano on July 18th, I found the year the piano was made in from the serial number, and then documented the major issues that would need to be fixed outside of the standard protocol. There was one issue I found: the fallboard would overextend when in the closed position. However, before I could get to focus on this, I had to tune it up 2 times to get it to pitch and have a strong tuning stability. Then I pulled the pieces off and opened up the piano.
You can see the result of the typical cleaning and shining underneath the keys and in the bottom side of the piano. The rod you see there is a dehumidifier, with a dampp-chaser sensor, which would maintain the humidity level inside the piano around 42%. Pianos need to stay at a good humidity level, so the action parts don't get too stiff, or so the wooden parts and soundboard don't crack. I covered humidity in-depth in this blog post. I decided to save the rod for another piano that would need it more. After that, I took a look at shining some of the brass parts as well as replacing some felts that were worn.
One of the most satisfying parts of restoring pianos is shining the brass hardware. The knobs on the fallboard are very noticeable when they're tarnished, and the golden shine on the music stand pieces brings out the beauty in the piano. I also found that the silver Wurlitzer plaque had some old green felt surrounding the letters, and I was able to wipe that off to make the plaque shine as well. The fallboard felt was also falling apart, and so I chiseled it and the old glue off to make way for softer, smoother red felt.
Speaking of red felt, look at that brand new felt on the pedals! The wheels, pedals, and leg bands also needed shined, as well as the steel treble strings, and it is easiest to tilt the piano on its back to perform that work. I was able to thoroughly clean the inside and make the rest of the brass beautiful, and with the new felt on the pedals there is no more thumping sound when quickly releasing pedals. While it was on its back I lubricated and cleaned the wheels so it can roll more smoothly on its own and tightened up every visible screw. The tilt is a minor part of working on pianos but forgoing it can lead to wheels that scratch floors, or pedals that don't work to the pianist's liking.
After this I worked on the keys and the action of this piano. Since it is a spinet, it has a "drop action", or an action that sits below the keys rather than on them. I didn't document that work since it was fairly routine, needing only a thorough cleaning, lubrication, screw tightening, and hammer filing. There was only one uncommon problem in the action: one hammer spring had been bent completely out of shape and was no longer giving the proper tension to push the hammer back into its resting position. Fortunately, I had received a bag of hammer springs from Garrett Stowe as part of the extra tools and supplies (which you can read about here), so I was able to quickly replace the spring. The keys needed their tops cleaned, and I also puffed up the key bushing felt with a chemical mixture rather than replace it. There will be another day where I go into detail the work a spinet action can need.
Similar to some of the other aspects of restoring I've covered, I'll only briefly touch on some aspects of regulation. Checking, let-off, and key height are the easiest to show with pictures. The regulation on this piano wasn't totally off, but it was definitely not uniform; my dad, who is not a pianist, hit an F chord, paused, hit F4 and E4, and said "those don't feel the same!" He was shocked to see that key dip being slightly different (as in, one key going down .005 inches further than its neighbor) could make a noticeable difference in play.
I picked some pictures that show the differences I was able to make: the first two show the difference in checking, that is, the distance between the hammer and the string after being activated and falling back without releasing the key. After making a small adjustment, both hammers fall to exactly the same position. The next two pictures show the let-off adjustment, which is how close a hammer can get to the strings while slowly pressing the key before falling back. If you press a key slowly enough, the hammer should never actually make contact with the strings. The magnet strip you see on the strings is 1/8 of an inch thick, and I want the hammer to just barely brush against it. After making an adjustment to the let-off button in the action, I got the hammer to move closer to the string before falling. The final pictures are a little simpler, showing the height of a sharp key. The aluminum bar will rest on top of all the sharps, which allows me to raise each key to be level with the bar. The key is visibly too low, so I added a thin paper punching to the back rail it rests on to raise it higher.
There are more aspects of regulation I haven't listed here, such as lost motion and damper regulation, but all of it was done to this piano for each of the 88 keys to make it play much more smoothly and more uniformly. With it ready to put back together, I only have to fix the fallboard issue with the missing dowel.
Above you can see that the mechanism designed to let the fallboard slide was missing a piece. Without it, the fallboard could slide farther than designed. I took out some wooden dowels I had, cut them to shape, and got them secured in the holes and reinforced so they would be very unlikely to fall out again. Once the glue dried, I was able to put the piano back together, do a final tuning and voicing, and see how my sister liked it!
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