Our player piano

This is about our player piano.

My in-laws were given this piano (a Wurlitzer-Kingston player), as close as I can tell, somewhere around 1946. They were building their house in Syracuse NY right after the war and one of the neighbors came by and asked them if they wanted it. My in-laws said yes, so they all rolled the piano down the street on pipes, then alongside the house and into the basement. There it stayed for 50 years. My wife remembers as a kid playing the piano rolls. I came into my wife's life around 1980, and when visiting her home, I went to the basement occasionally to tinker with the piano. A little oiling, cleaning, etc. confirmed that it was still a working player.

My father-in-law decided they needed to do some basement cleaning in the mid-80's, and they asked us if we wanted the piano. We did, so we drove to NY with a UHaul to pick it up. Once we got it back home to Detroit, the first thing I did before anything else was to strip and refinish it. It had been painted chocolate brown. After refinishing, it is a beautiful mahogany. Unfortunately I could not save the Wurlitzer decal on the keyboard cover.

Now to the restoration. For years I tried patching with various combinations of cloth and rubber cement without much success. I got the piano working about 50-60% of what it should be. The air motor did not turn smoothly, and many of the keys did not play crisply. So the real problem was that the motor bellows and the key bellows were leaking, and the paper/cloth needed to be replaced.

Well, we moved to Wisconsin from Detroit, and we brought along another of my wife's inherited pieces, a metal porch swing. I stripped and painted it, and we decided we wanted a cover for it. From one of the gardening magazines, we ordered an all-weather cover. When the cover came, lo and behold, it was made of a lightweight, flexible, dense fabric (I still don't know the name of it) but to all appearances it looked to me to be the perfect fabric for rebuilding my piano. And the cover came in its own bag made of the same material, and there was plenty of fabric in the bag for the job. First I tried repairing the motor, using contact cement and this new fabric. It worked! The motor started running perfectly smoothly, with no erratic turns or dead spots. Wow.

So, during Memorial Day weekend in maybe 1998 or so, I took the whole player unit to my workshop and rebuilt 90% of all the 88 bellows. Some of the lower and upper bellows didn't need replacing, but most did.

Wow, once I replaced those bellows and worked on a couple of other linkages that were leaking air, did the player play nicely! Very crisp runs! Wonderful.

Sorry I don't know what that fabric is called, but it worked perfectly. It was a miracle.

Just found out that replacement fallboard decals are available. I'll get a replacement and also get some replacement knobs and rubber bumpers and felt soon.