So…who will teach me????
Where do you go…to whom do you go to learn a craft and trade that almost doesn’t exist?
You try the mentor route. The trouble with that is the first sentence…there is no one out there that actually gets this trade.
In the old days, a piano needed a pin block…maybe it gets replaced…but a soundboard and bridges…you just take the piano out back, one bullet to the brain and it’s the dumpster for you.
The mentor route wasn’t viable because those trying to rebuild just put back whatever the factory put there in the first place. You may think this interesting, but the factory is not always right. Just look at the older pianos from the late 1800’s. They weren’t really pianos as we know them today. The mechanical and acoustical features were crude at best. We can’t put it back together that way.
And even in the case of the better modern pianos, was it before or after???? Before or after what…?…the beer break. “Back in the day” as the kids put it, there wasn’t a coffee break at 11AM. Someone would come to the middle of the floor in the factory and put down a bucket of suds…that’s right…BEER. The workers would approach the bucket with their personal stein in hand, take their dip and go back, trade stories, and down the brew.
Now then…was your piano done…before…or after the dip.
My dilemma remained. Where do I go to learn how to do it if all around me were just “doing it the way the factory did it”? Worse yet, I would hear after asking a pertinent question about a process, “Well, we always did it that way”. It was cutting off the ends of the roast all over again. Don’t know that story? This is as good a place as any.
One day a young girl asked her mom, when making a roast, why it was she dutifully cut off the ends. The mom replied that her mom always did it that way, that’s the way she learned, and that’s the way she continued to make a roast. But being a good teaching mom, she suggested that the next time they visited with grandmom, the granddaughter should ask, and ask she did…”Grandmom, why did mom learn to cut off the ends of a roast? Grandmom replied, “When I was a young married woman, we didn’t have much money and a large roasting pan was not something on which I would spend that hard earned cash. The normal sized roast would not fit in my pan (…wait for it…) so I got into the habit of cutting off the ends.”
That was nice for the meal, but not good enough for me to learn a complicated process.
My background was in science. We learned a lot about deductive reasoning. The process then was something they call today: reverse engineering. I let the piano teach me.
I was able to get my hands on two pianos; a Steinway A, and a Mason & Hamlin AA. These were two top tier piano designs. I took to the task of ripping them down, but as I did that I would record what was done, and try to figure out, both acoustically and mechanically where the manufacturer wanted to be, and how I could get them there during the “put it back” process.
It took a long time and a lot of sleepless nights, and as it turned out, many more pianos than those two I had at the time.
After fully realizing that my “mentors” were not going to give me and my rebuildings what I needed, I moved off on my own to my first little shop. This goes back some 45 years.
I took on jobs but had no tools. How do you do that…you stall. “Ralph, will you rebuild my piano?” “Why certainly,” I would reply, “but my schedule is so backed up, there will be a bit of a wait.” With that, I would contract the job, get a healthy deposit, and you guessed it, went out and bought tools for that specific job. Before you knew it, my shop was small, but it could do everything but refinish. Refinishing was better left to those who did that for a living…so I left it with them.
And down that slippery slope I call piano rebuilding I slid………………………………………