Pictures of the Piano

The piano is back from refurb. New lots of things.

First, a front view of the piano. Yes, very similar to the old pictures, but this one is in my house :-) Next I took the panel out in front of the tops of the strings and the tuning pegs. Doing this uncovered several things. First pictured is that the panel I removed is veneered on the inside with bird's eye maple. Nice stuff.

First here we have the serial number and date. Next is the detailing around the pedals, and finally the pile of junk I pulled out of the crevices in the back of the piano. The little white rectangular thing in the middle is a piece of ivory.

Here's the front with all the panels above the keyboard removed (except the keyboard cover, that is screwed on and I didn't feel like bothering.) A good view of the top 2/3 of the mechanism. Second we have where someone signed one of the pedal levers. I'm guessing this was someone involved with building it in the first place.

A few related pictures, primarily because most people have never seen this before. The tool is a piano tuning hammer, and the second picture shows it as it would be used. Basically a big lever with exactly the right wrench head on it. The last picture is of 2 "keytop heads" - the wide part of the top of a key. One was with the piano and was given to me with it, and the other I found in the back. They're both ivory.

On that note, I've found sources on the web for both salvaged keytops and brand-new real ivory. Apparently people have pre-ban ivory stocks still and are slowly going through them. To completely replace all the ivory on the keyboard (59 keys) with new is $1100. Ow. Salvaged is much more reasonable, but there's no guarantee that you'll get ivories that will fit (they may be longer and narrower, or shorter and wider.) Too big is easy to fix (file), too small is a show stopper.

It's amazingly out of tune, and has some of the best tone and definitely the best feel I've ever run into. Wow.


It's a ~1900 Schubert Cabinet Grand. Needs new ivory, some cleaning, tuning, and moving here from Stafford Springs, CT. I'm hoping to rent a truck the first weekend of January (weather permitting) and do it as a day trip. Apparently it weighs >600 lbs, and is a full 4 person move. I can't afford piano movers, so... ow. That's gonna hurt.