The Piano Paid for Itself

It's always entertaining to open up a piano and discover things that shouldn't be there.  Pens and pencils are pretty much at the top of the list, with paperclips a close second.  Grand pianos seem especially prone to swallowing things - the open fallboard is shaped just right to funnel these things down and into the action.  Pennies, dimes, and nickels are notorious for finding their way into the spaces between the keys.  Rounding out the collection are:  playing cards and postcards; pieces of children's toys; bits of candy; crayons; nuts and seeds stored by mice (and their little poops); rubber mutes, small piano parts, and bits of felt and paper and wood left by previous tuners.

Things often show up on the floor of uprights, behind the bottom board.  My favorite is the old glass jar that held water a million years ago, meant to humidify the piano.  I found a piano with what appeared to be the entire contents of a file cabinet drawer stuffed down there, perhaps by a child delighted to find a slot above the board at the right height that could swallow paper endlessly.  Piano tuners sometimes store broken bass strings down there, or other things that they intend to repair some day.

Does anyone know what this is?  My customer today handed it to me, having found it somewhere inside her piano.  It was in a plastic bag with a few ancient bass strings.  This must be what piano tuners do, she had imagined, store their tools inside their customers' pianos.  It's a tuning wrench of some sort, quite old it seems, with tuning tips welded at both ends.  The tips have square openings, and they are oriented nearly 90 degrees to each other, so it's an offset tuning wrench.  But I can't imagine what it would be used for.  It would be too awkward for regular tuning - maybe it's for extracting tuning pins after the strings have been removed.

People always want to know if I find money inside pianos.  Aside from the aforementioned pennies and dimes, I have been enriched by the occasional quarters I find.  But one time I removed the bottom board of a spinet and found a wad of cash, which I handed to the owner.  There was just enough money to pay for the tuning.