My Piano

 

This is my piano.
 

It is a spinet style made in the 50s. It is the fourth piece of furniture we bought for our house. We found it in the daily classifieds at my sweetie’s office just after the boy was born (about 7 years ago). It was just across the border in NJ and owned by a band director. It had been purchased new by their family 50 years earlier.

And the price was right!
 

We paid $400 plus $19.99 for renting the U-haul. It was in great shape (I’m a self-proclaimed expert) except for one broken key way down low. Only one key? How much could that cost? Soon there were five more broken keys, some in the middle of the piano. I figured that because of all the lifting and moving (four steps down to the truck and two steps up to our house) it needed to be tuned also, so I called a guy. This guy apparently tuned everyone’s piano, or at least everyone from church.

 

He took one look at the piano and said

it would cost $800 to repair the piano

before he could tune it.
 

Once I regained consciousness I asked why $800 to fix six keys. He said that back in the 50s there was this new-fangled kind of plastic made from soy beans. Everyone was using it in everything, including pianos. This plastic was shown (and here demonstrated) to crystallize and crack in the following 10 to 30 years. He said that he was surprised that it was in as good a condition that it was - three of these plastic parts had obviously already been replaced now that he mentioned it. He also said that I was lucky that only one part – on every key – was made out of this miracle plastic.

 

Notice those beautiful broken yellow soybean elbows?

And he would have to take out the “action” (sounding board?) so he could take it back to his workshop and replace the remaining 85 elbows (as those little menaces are called), oh, and it would take two months.

No thank you.
 

Why in the name of everything pure and good would I pay DOUBLE what I paid for my piano to get it fixed when it wasn’t really broken yet. But it was not over. I courteously told him what I paid for the piano and what he was suggesting was out of my price range. Could he just fix those six keys? No. He said that if he fixed these six keys now, he would be back in a month to repair another six keys. And then a month after that…you get the idea. It would be more work for him and cost me more in the long run. Well, being the

justboughtahousehadanewbabythenmommyquitworkingandalsoboughttwonewcars family, 















we were not really looking to invest in anything. We were trying to get by. 

Then could he just tune it?
 

He said he wouldn’t. I asked why. He said that he could not, in good conscience allow me to spend money on something that was less than playable. Come on! How often do you really use A-flat below middle C? And the others were in the way upper and lower octaves. He also said it would basically be blasphemy in the piano tuner’s world.

Fine! Get out of my house!
 

After a good cry, having another child,
finding out that we use Aflat quite a bit in the children’s songbook (and about two years), my sweetie gave me a little push. He said that instead of scrapping the piano or watching it slowly deteriorate, I should fix it myself.

WHAT?@?@@???

IT.
IS.

A.
PIANO!!

Not a flat tire or a loaf of bread or a quilt.
 

But he pushed me just enough to make me start looking. I found a website about the type of piano and the type of plastic. Yup, the guy was telling the truth. Those elbows had to go. And I was going to do it. I looked some more and found a little tutorial on where to order these little babies and how to simply (albeit unorthodoxly) install them. I ordered the parts and after staring at the little paper bag that the parts were shipped in (I kid you not) for a few days, I opened the front of the piano, cracked out the rest of the old soybean plastic elbow (who likes soybeans anyway?) and worked some magic.

 

New elbow and old elbow (already cracked out of the piano)

I had those six keys fixed in about an hour using my handy-dandy needle nosed pliers. Take that little greedy perfectionist piano man!!!

Who needs you and your tuning fork anyway??!@?
 

Piano: $400
U-Haul rental: $19.99
Set of new reliable nylon elbows: $44.18 including shipping.
Pride in myself and my money-saving abilities: priceless.

.