Good morning everyone,
As I mentioned a few days ago in the "introduce myself" section, I purchased a second-hand piano (maybe..) for 150 Euro.
Searching for some information on the internet, I stumbled upon this site which immediately excited me, so now I am taking advantage of your patience.
I am trying to fix it up a bit. I would like to do it myself, partly because it's not a time for expenses, partly because given the price I'm not afraid of ruining it, but the main reason is that the subject of setup, tuning, and voicing passions me.
It has always been a passion of mine to go inside and try to understand how things are made; perhaps I haven't yet outgrown the childhood phase of liking to take things apart. Anyway, behind all the things we purchase, even seemingly trivial ones, there is always a great deal of design and study work, today just as centuries ago, and this greatly intrigues me.
Oops, I'm rambling... back to the piano immediately...
First of all, aesthetically it's not bad, and it was even accepted by my wife
here are some photos:
The keys are still white (perhaps because they aren't ivory?) and don't give an old impression.
The brand is Waldemar; I searched the Internet, found something, but not much.
I haven't been able to find the year of construction.
After a good cleaning with the vacuum cleaner, I fixed some things that were quite easy to resolve, which I will list for you:
(sorry if I use some approximate terms)
1. one key was not sounding; the pin of the lever had come out and the key was dangling sideways.
2. one key made a click during release; I re-glued a felt where the pusher would hit during release.
To understand the problem, I struggled a bit looking and re-looking, with all the mechanics detached, to see how the good keys behaved compared to the "bad" one.
3. other keys had lateral movement and ended up hitting the string haphazardly; I fixed this by acting on the small plate that fixes the hammer to the lever. Here, the mechanism doesn't seem like much to me, in the sense that one needs to tighten the plate's screw with a lot of force...
After these adjustments, I decided to attempt tuning. The piano was quite out of tune and down by about half a tone on average.
With patience, I recorded the individual notes using the "entropy piano tuner" software and then, with my own patience, but also that of my family members, I brought the instrument back to a decent tuning.
A couple of weeks have passed and the tuning seems to have held.
After tuning, I recorded the notes again because I intend, in a few weeks, to record them again and see, thanks to the possibility of exporting to Excel, if there have been any variations.
Perhaps later I will indulge myself by having it tuned a bit better by a professional tuner.
Now we come to the points that I still cannot improve.
The most annoying thing concerns the dampers. Not all of them, but only those concerning the last octave, before obviously the final keys where the dampers are no longer present.
I tried to understand why, but I haven't reached a certain answer.
What is certain is that as one goes towards the higher notes, the dampers (which are located above the hammer) are increasingly close to the point where the string rests on the frame, where it becomes harder to dampen. I tried to lower one damper slightly, but it immediately created interference with the hammer, so that's not the right way.
I thought it was applying too little pressure, but even by pushing the damper by hand, the behavior does not improve.
Probably the problem lies in the state of the felt. In fact, they seem a bit soft to me,
I am attaching two photos:
Can one attempt to replace them by using generic felt (like the kind used in kindergarten for pricking drawings with a pin)? I expect to be scolded just for having thought of it...
I still have a little problem with one key that sounds softer than the others, but apparently everything seems fine. I intend to disassemble it to look closer; I will let you know.
However, removing a key carries the almost certain risk of ruining the end part of the felt strip (bretellina), which looks like it's made of leather. It is very dry and tends to crumble.
For now, though, I will stop here, so as not to throw too much fuel on the fire.
Thank you,
a hug to everyone.
Angelo
