Steinway Square Grand

Grand pianos come in two shapes:  the familiar wing shape, and a rectangular shape referred to as square.  Square grands are no longer made, which is why you don't see them often, but they were made as often as their wing-shaped cousins for more than half of the piano's 300 years of existence.  If you do see a square grand, it is likely to be pretty old.

This is one of many squares that I have maintained over the years.  It was made by Steinway in 1864, and it is in splendid condition.  It is not quite seven feet across, with a rosewood case, 88 keys, and two pedals.  The left pedal is a moderator pedal; it moves a rail with a thick strip of felt between the hammers and the strings to soften the sound.  It has two bass bridges, a tenor bridge, and a long, tightly curved treble bridge.  The tuning pins have oblong rather than square ends.

The regular wing-shaped grand has its strings more or less parallel with the keys, running from the keyboard back to the tail.  The square grand has its strings more or less transverse to the keys, running from left to right.  The wing shape evolved from the harpsichord.  There were also square harpsichords (called virginals), but the square grand evolved from the rectangular clavichord.  Wing grands stand on three legs, square grands on four.  The lid of a wing grand is hinged on the straight left side, and on a square is hinged along the back.

As did the wing grands, square grands became bigger and bigger over time.  Unlike the wing grands, square grands did not scale up well.  The transverse string pattern had to be fanned out such that the bass strings run left to right, but the extreme treble strings run parallel to the keys.  This requires a similar fanning of the hammerhead angles, key length, and damper felts, making regulation a nightmare.  More and more of the tuning pins were placed at the far back side of the piano, making tuning a nightmare.  Three or more bridges were needed to accomodate the stringing pattern, and the treble bridge developed a tight curve just at the point where the fanned strings all come together, creating a deadly weakness in the bridge.



What people liked about the square grand was that it was less expensive, and fit more easily in a small space - you could tuck it right into a corner.  When upright pianos finally became serious instruments, they took this advantage away from square grands, and by the late 19th century, manufacturers stopped making squares.  Or they wished they could stop making squares, because uprights were more profitable, yet demand for squares lingered.  The manufacturers made a statement:  in 1904, at a professional meeting in Atlantic City, they built a giant bonfire of square grands.  Even at that, I have come across a 1930's square grand made by Mathushek, an attempt at modernizing the square.

Square grands are not common, but they are not rare, either.  Many were made, and there is nothing particularly valuable about them.  You can get them easily for free, so don't get suckered by an antiques dealer.  They do not and will never feel or sound like modern pianos.  It can cost a fortune to fix or rebuild them because nothing about them is standard, everything has to be custom made or jury-rigged, the work is very labor-intensive, and therefore expensive.  Many technicians refuse to go near them.  There will be no return on your investment.

They are sometimes very pretty, always awesome, and make great conversation pieces.  They are often turned into desks and tables.  I've seen the legs turned into pedestals or small side tables.  If a square grand is in good condition, and you can find a willing technician, and can afford the repair, it can be a lovely and satisfying instrument.

Technician tips, click here . . .

Tips for Technicians

For tuning, remove the damper mechanism.  It comes out as a single piece.  First remove the stop rail, which is held in place with three or four knurled nuts.  Then slowly rotate all the dampers up, being careful not to catch any levers on the stop rail bolts, snapping them.  Holding the dampers clear of the bolts, remove the knurled bolt on the left, and gently lift and slide the mechanism to the left to slip the right pin out of its hole.  Place the mechanism on a horizontal surface, where it won't be stepped on.  Resume breathing.

If you have an oblong adapter, you can try using it.  I prefer a threaded oblong tip, but I hate trying to remove the tip of my regular tuning lever, it's usually jammed on pretty good.  I have a spare extension rod with a short head for getting into tight places.  That tip comes off easily, so I remove it and attach the oblong tip.  Then I slip that rod into the tuning handle, except when tuning the upper treble section, where it's easier to just use the naked rod.

For the treble section, hold the tuning lever at its end with your fingertips rather than trying to grip the whole handle.  As you lean way over, keep your shoulders relaxed, use your back as a cantilever.  Take breaks to stand and stretch.  Pay very close attention to which string goes with which pin so you don't snap a string.  The tuning pins are often labeled; wipe the dust away to see.  Believe me, you don't want to have to replace a string.  The string tension is quite low, so there's no point trying to stretch octaves.  For tapping in a loose tuning pin, hold the pin with a small adjustable wrench, leaving the top of the pin slightly above the wrench.  Then lightly tap the pin with a small hammer.

The most common adjustment needed is to correct rubbing hammerheads, and the most common repair is of the thread loops for the jack springs.  Both require removing the action.  If you need to correct rubbing hammers, mark which hammers need shifting.

Remove the keyslip by lifting it up.  Using a T hammer with a standard square tip, remove the three or four bolts holding the action in place from underneath the case.  Figure out where you're going to put the action before you remove it.  A card table works well.  I often work with it on the floor.  It will not fit on a piano bench.  Gently slide the action out of the case.  Slide it out perfectly straight and level.  It is big and floppy, so be careful.  Set it down.

Adjusting the hammers is straightforward, you'll see the problems right away.  If the leathers have worn through and the remains are flapping around, just remove them.  Only move the hammers that need it, don't get hooked into moving all the hammers around or you'll mess up the alignment with the strings.  If a center pin has slipped out, it may need replacing.  Perhaps the hammer butt has a split that needs gluing.  There is usually some mechanism for adjusting the friction on the center pin, so check that.

The jack spring thread loop is underneath the rocker that the jack is attached to, so you need to remove the key.  First, remove the nameboard, usually by removing two big screws at either end.  Then remove the hammer of the note whose key you wish to remove.  Make sure the jack is pushed down flat against the key.  Lift the key until it clears the balance rail pin.  This is easier to do in the treble than in the bass.  Then begin sliding the key forward.  Tilt it so the backcheck can clear the various obstructions.  Most of the time this works if you persevere.  If the backcheck is rotted, it may fall apart, and you may have to make a new one, so note how it is made.  Once the key is out, remove the rocker and replace the thread in the usual manner.  Make sure there is enough spring tension to make the jack return smartly.  After reassembly, check the key for lost motion.  There should be a little bit.  The hammer should sit on the rest felt, not be lifted above it.  Adjust the lost motion by turning the screws on the rocker.  Slightly loosen one screw first, then tighten the other.  Often one of the screws is obscured under a rail, so you can try lifting the key and pulling it out just enough to expose the screw.

When you are done with repairs and adjustments, carefully slide the action back in, keeping it straight and level.  About halfway in, stop.  Check under the plate in back to make sure that the hammerheads at the ends of the sections will not bump into any part of the plate.  Check all the jacks to make sure they are in the right position; if you had lifted or removed any hammers while repairing, the jacks probably flipped down, out from under the butts.  If so, just push the jacks back into place.  Make sure the hammerheads have room to pop up as you do this.  Finally, if you forgot to put the nameboard back in, now's your chance.

Resume sliding the action in.  If you feel resistance when it is almost all the way in, it is the damper wires having trouble getting back on the felt cushions that are glued to the keys.  Don't force the action in, you'll either pop the cushions off or bend the damper wires.  Go as far as you can, with a little pressure, then lift the damper wires from above until the offending wire comes free.  Then try sliding the action again.  You may have to do this a few times.  Consider adjusting the wire by rotating the leather rest nut and praying that it doesn't turn to powder in your fingers.  Or maybe leave the wire nuts alone.
Contract post

This Old Piano

I've been trying to help a woman who inherited an old grand piano.  She has no place for it, and doesn't want to go through the trouble of selling it (it would not fetch much).  She has found someone to give the piano to, but he's very nervous about maintenance costs.

They each consulted local piano technicians.  Her technician worked for a piano dealer, so he pronounced the piano a piece of junk, and suggested they get rid of it and buy one of his.  All this did was make everyone paranoid about the piano's condition.

His technician was a full-time rebuilder.  He loved the piano, said it was wonderful, and suggested that $14,000 would be sufficient to bring it back to life.  All this did was make everyone paranoid about the cost of piano maintenance.

Neither of these technicians said anything wrong.  They were merely talking up their lines of business.  Dealers sell, rebuilders rebuild.  Ordinary piano owners, however, don't know about these distinctions among technicians.

The woman contacted me through a mutual friend, and I tried to help her over the phone.  Because my specialty is repair, I of course suggested repairing the piano.  I gave her an idea of what it might cost, based on her description of what the other technicians had said, but I cautioned that without inspecting the piano, I couldn't be sure.  The problem was that the piano was three hours away from me.

After a number of phone conversations, I thought what the hell, and arranged to go see the piano, giving the owner a break on the cost, friend to friend.  I was also thinking, though, that if there was enough work and the means to pay for it, and if I could be put up for a few nights, it could work for me.  I did this once for a family near New York City.  They had a spare apartment, and room in the basement for a makeshift shop, and I spent a week reconditioning their old Steinway upright.  They fed me dinner each night (with wine!)

The piano was exactly what I expected: about seventy years old, worn but not abused, no significant damage, playable.  It had been an upper quality piano out of the factory.  Someone had done a pretty good job of replacing the hammerheads at some point, and the bass strings and tuning pins were replacements, too.  The piano was even at concert pitch! I could have just tuned it, and it would have been fine for casual use or beginner's lessons.  I drew up a list of things worth doing, all those little maintenance things that had gotten overlooked over the years.  It was a great candidate for rebuilding, if anyone had the money.  Otherwise, it could be used for another decade, maybe two, but not for professional or heavy use.  I would have been happy to do the work.

The intended recipient has been speaking with me, still nervous about long-term maintenance costs, whether the piano is "worth it," wondering if I would do the work piecemeal.  I just wrote him a long email, and I thought I'd post some of it here.

The reason why you can find old pianos for free or cheap is because they all need work, and continue needing work.  In fact, new pianos need maintenance too, but it gets put off until finally the piano is unplayable and needs a lot of work all at once.  Things then just get worse as the maintenance is put off for decades.

An old piano is like an old car - you expect it to need repairs regularly.  It just gets worn down.  Things loosen or come unglued here and there, it starts making noises.  Some of this is easily corrected (depending on who you talk to), the rest you just let go.  The key is finding the person who will keep your piano going and not try to gouge money out of you.  Like finding the car mechanic who will keep your old clunker going enough to get to the grocery store on a regular basis.  The only time you run into trouble is with a piano tuner who doesn't want to do repairs, and who tries to sell you something else, like a new piano or a full rebuilding.  Those things are fine if that's what you want.  Otherwise, stick with the guy willing to do repairs and you'll be OK.

Here's my advice.  Take the piano, it's a pretty OK piano.  Find someone to come and tune it.  If he (or she) says it can't be tuned, or it needs to be rebuilt, throw him out and find someone else.  If he says there might be a little work needed with the tuning pins to hold the tension, then let him do a little work.  Only a little.  If he says your soundboard has cracks, say "Yes, I know," and leave it at that.

Then play it.  It's already playable, just needs the tuning.

Later, say a year or two or three from now, you'll have a better sense of what you'd like from the instrument.  Maybe some regulation, maybe some voicing, maybe the inevitable miscellaneous repairs.  But keep up with the maintenance.  It won't cost you much if you keep up with it.

Consider, after tuning, getting the soundboard fixed.  Not all tuners know how to fix an old soundboard without going through all kinds of craziness, so you might have to hunt around, but that would have great benefit for the piano.

Clean and lemon-oil the case, use a scratch cover for the dings, I'm sure you could do this yourself over a weekend.  Dust off the plate and strings, use a vacuum if needed, wipe the damper heads (in the direction of the strings).  Ask the tuner to run a cloth over the soundboard, under the strings.  We have little gizmos for doing that.  A clean piano will make you feel better.

If you do want to hire me a year or so from now, the reconditioning offer is still open.  I could take care of all those little things that need attention (like the soundboard, and tapping all the tuning pins in, and seating the strings on the bridge correctly, and correcting the voicing and the regulation, and leveling the keys and tidying up the keytops, cleaning up the dampers, etc.) Of course, if you find the guy up there willing to do all these things (and do them correctly), then you'll be all set.

Creativity or Incompetence?

This is the first part of a two-part post.  The second part is here.

The line between creative problem-solving and hack-work is blurry.  A solution acceptable to one may be unacceptable to another.  There is room for disagreement, and circumstances are never so clear as to make the best solution obvious.  Budgets need to be adhered to, piano usage differs, pianos vary in quality, time is an ingredient.  The main difference between hack-work and creative problem-solving is in the use of judgement.  Was a repair made hastily with little thinking about the full effects?  Was a repair executed poorly for lack of insight about materials or mechanisms?  Were money and time not spent out of mere stinginess?

When I was working in a rebuilding shop, the movers one day rolled in a small upright which we promptly took apart and examined.  One look at the bass bridge, and we all began laughing and pointing.  Some poor soul had attempted to repair the bridge with hilariously disastrous results.  Later, one of the crew admitted to having done the work years before, and insisted that it had been a creative solution.  It sure looked like hack-work to the rest of us, though.

What this technician had encountered was a bass bridge that had split along the pin line - a common occurrence.  Apparently many of the bridge pins had actually fallen out, the rest had shifted well out of place, and the unmoored bass strings were buzzing like crazy.  Some people might have said forget it, the piano is junk - it was of mediocre quality to begin with, and the split bridge could have been indicative of many other problems throughout the piano.

The "proper" way to fix the bridge would have been to move the piano to a shop, flip it on its back, remove the trap and pedalwork, loosen the bass strings and move them aside, remove the bass bridge and make and install a replacement.  But the sort of owners who have a piano like this are usually the sort who cannot afford such a procedure.  Is there a creative solution between these extremes?

Our beleaguered technician tried this:  he would fill the crack with epoxy, and then drive in new pins.  It wasn't the best idea, and executed poorly it could be a disaster, and without the proper setup it would be cumbersome work, but that's what he did.  And he ran into difficulties.

Epoxy does have gap-filling ability, but there is a limit.  A narrow crack can be sealed, but this was a canyon he was trying to fill.  I'm sure he discovered that you can't draw a cracked bridge back together by clamping, either.  And a bridge pin driven into epoxy is not going to hold the way it does in wood.  At best this would be an impermanent repair that would perhaps alter the scaling of the bass section and not allow the bass strings to correctly sit on the bridge.  But it might eliminate the buzzing and allow for tuning, however temporary, and at little cost.  It's potentially a creative solution for the conditions, even given the limitations.

Here's where it all went wrong:  the technician had no extra bridge pins, and he hadn't given himself the time to order them and wait for the shipment.  He tried making his own by cutting the ends off of small common nails.  Even this is creative and not entirely incorrect.  A bridge pin does look like the end of a nail.  If you did it correctly and carefully you could make a batch of bridge pins this way.  But the technician was running out of time, and time is money.

Bridge pins might look like small nails, but they are not installed the way nails are.  They are not driven into the bridge, and if you try it you'll see why.  Holes of the proper diameter and angle must be drilled first, and the pins are then tapped in.  There should be enough friction to hold the pins securely.  Our intrepid technician overlooked this detail, and with bridge pins/nails in hand, proceeded to hammer away.  The pins ended up angled every which way, some mashed and bent, and not exactly lined up properly.  The epoxy set, and for good or ill our man was done.

To his credit, he had eliminated the buzzing, and the piano could be tuned well enough for his customer, who was happy to have not been billed a lot of money for the work.  Over time, the epoxy had held, though I'm sure the pins had drifted, and maybe the buzzing had started to come back.  I'm sure it was more work and hassle for the technician than it was worth, and ultimately embarrassing.

Next:  my turn.

Nice Piece of Trapwork

I found a design flaw in a Boston grand.  Boston is the brand designed by Steinway and built by the Kawai factory in Japan.  They're really beautiful pianos.

The notes were making a clanking sound, and I guessed the problem right away.  I could feel it - the dampers were jumping up too high at the end of the keystroke, and instead of being stopped by the stop rail, they were hitting the metal sostenuto rail.

So the damper stop rail was positioned too high.  That's easy enough to fix, but I had to find out first why the rail was out of position.  The usual culprit is that the damper pedal isn't being properly stopped.  As a result, every time the pedal is depressed, the damper tray pushes all the dampers hard into the stop rail.  Over time this succeeds in pushing the damper stop rail up out of the way.  Hence, clanking.




The usual way to stop the damper pedal is by stopping the damper trap lever, which the pedal moves by pushing up on the pedal rod.  I got under the piano and took a look.  The stop consisted of a capstan screwed into the case underside.  Whenever the pedal was depressed, a piece of felt glued to the top of the lever contacted the capstan, stopping the lever.  The capstan made it adjustable, the felt reduced noise.  The felt, though, was soft - it was the kind of woven felt used for the hammer rail in an upright.  The capstan was quite small, and it had driven a divot into the soft felt, rendering the stop useless.

I thought of simply adjusting the capstan, but I would have had to adjust it quite a bit, which is not a lot of fun to do lying on one's back.  The possibilities also existed that the capstan might not have been long enough to fill the gap, and that the felt was now too thin at the contact point to provide any padding.  I also thought of simply adding more felt, but the misshapen felt really needed replacing, so I removed the trap lever from the piano.

If there's anyplace where a manufacturer is going to try to save money, it's the trapwork.  But this was the most beautifully made trap lever I had ever seen.  The coil spring sat in a lovely felt-lined cup, and had a piece of felt carefully woven through it to avoid creaking.  The pitman sat on a buckskin/felt cushion inlay, and there was a generous piece of hard leather where the pedal rod made contact.  There even was a piece of buckskin wrapped across the bottom and up the side of the lever to protect it from contact with the guide hook.  The only flaw was the soft stop felt.  What was needed was a chunk of hard felt, like the kind used for hammer heads, and that's what I installed.

The design error was that the felt was too soft for the capstan.  If the capstan had been much larger in diameter, and therefore exerting less pressure (pressure = force/surface area), it might have worked.  I was actually tempted to remove the capstan and install the traditional stop: a piece of wood glued to the underside of the case, with the hard felt attached to it, and no felt on the lever itself.  This works well, and eliminates the possibility of a divot, but it's not as easy to adjust.  So I'll have to keep an eye on my new stop felt; this piano gets a lot of use.