Rebuilding a Piano

Ever wonder what it means to rebuild a piano? Let me walk you through this unique process:

The piano is stripped of all of its hardware, and the action is removed. The cast iron plate is taken out of the piano (the plate is the large gold metal frame inside the piano). The pinblock -- the laminated block of maple under the plate that holds the tuning pins -- is replaced. The soundboard is replaced. This is often a point of contention in the piano world, since the soundboard has been attributed a mystical and sacred status and so on, but it's made from wood, and anyone who has ever been trained to install a soundboard in a new Steinway could install one in an old piano. If the old board is dried up, riddled with cracks & collapsed, it cannot resonate properly, and a correctly installed new one is always an improvement.

The soundboard is fashioned by cutting a thin (1 - 2 cm) wide piece of spruce from the Pacific NW to exactly the shape of the pianos rim, which then has the ribs glued to its underside in a special press that, when the glue dries, gives the soundboard a diaphrammatic shape. This means that the board is a little higher in the middle than at the edges, like a violin only subtler. After the board is installed and before the piano is strung, you can thump the board with your fist and it'll resonate like a bass drum.

Then the piano is stripped and refinished. If the case is natural wood (mahogany, walnut, rosewood, etc.), then any veneer repairs have to be perfectly matched. The piano is stained -- according to a customers taste, or if I own the piano, my taste -- and then sprayed with 7 coats of clear lacquer. If the piano is ebony there is no reason to spend a lot of time matching veneers. The ebony pianos are given 3 coats of black lacquer and 4 coats of clear lacquer. After a 28-day cure time, the finish is hand-rubbed to even out the imperfections and to give it a "piano finish", which can be satin, traditional shine lacquer, or high-gloss, depending on your taste.

All this time, the action is getting rebuilt. The old action parts are removed, the keys are rebushed (new felt glued into the contact points), & the frame is repaired, if necessary. New action parts are installed. These are the hammers, the hammershanks to which they are glued, and the repetitions (the reps are the little contraptions between the key and the hammer, which are responsible for the touch and which were the crucial development in the invention of the piano. The repetitions allow you to throw the hammer at the strings at various speeds, which means you can play fortissimo or pianissimo). Proper regulation of these parts also allows the pianist to play very fast repeated notes.

There are many companies that make parts for Steinways now, and they each have their champions and detractors. For New York Steinways, I use only New York Steinway factory parts, because I think they are the best fit for these pianos, and also because there is no issue when I sell the piano that I have some sort of Frankenstein's monster. At times I find little things awry with the Steinway parts, but nothing I cannot fix or modify to make them work with whatever piano I'm working on. Of course, if the piano is made in Hamburg originally, I use Hamburg Steinway parts. For non-Steinways, like Bechsteins and Mason & Hamlins, I usually go with Renner parts, which often as not are used in these manufacturer's new pianos.

The action is regulated, or adjusted, to make the touch and weight even throughout the keyboard. The dampers are given new felts, reinstalled and regulated so that they keep the piano quiet when it's not being played, while giving the pianist the articulation needed. The piano is tuned and re-tuned until the strings are broken in and up to concert pitch, and then the piano is voiced. Voicing involves shaping and hardening the hammers with a solution of lacquer and lacquer thinner, to give the piano a big strong voice, which is then evened out and sweetened by selectively softening the overly bright hammers with needles. Voicing is a painstaking process in which the final voice of the piano is realized.

All of this regulating, tuning and voicing is actually done and redone a bit at a time, to ensure the realization of the piano's voice without "overworking" the hammers, thus shortening their life.

If all of this work is done with time-honored Steinway methods and parts, it is absolutely and certainly still a Steinway. Needless to say, there are more folks working on these pianos who don't know these methods than there are who do. The action which sits on my bench right now is a "shoemaker job" of misaligned and badly regulated parts, which I am fixing for a new customer who was never happy with the work she paid for over 5 years ago. When I first went to work rebuilding there were few companies that did this. There are many rebuilding firms now, as the economics of pianos has brought the price of a new Steinway sky-high.

A rebuilt Steinway is far less expensive than a new one. You may save even more by finding an old piano and paying for the rebuild. Since every piano new or old comes out different since the work is all done by hand, you wouldn't know exactly how it might turn out, but you would still have a gorgeous instrument worth much more than you paid for it.