Piano

One of the first things I wanted to get now that I lived in a house with some space was a piano. I had been using my keyboard for the last five years or so and it just isn't the same as playing on a real piano. After a little searching, I found I pretty decent one on craigslist. The woman selling it was asking $300 but by the time I responded, she had a moving truck and needed to get it out in the next 3 hours. This worked to my advantage because I got the piano for $150 and we used her moving truck to get it to my house. We just rolled it off the truck into my garage where it sat for about a month until I had a few stout friends to help me get up 6 stairs into my living room. The piano is in moderate condition, but is way out of regulation and needs a bit of tuning too. The first thing I did was to take it apart and clean it out which had probably never been done. I'm posting photos from the re-assembly process but the disassembly was just the reverse. I should add that the all-but-subtle paint job made it a little difficult to figure out the exact order of disassembly but I eventually got it without causing any major damage to the piano.

Here are the guts


Yep... that's the paint job I was talking about

The first pieces back were the blocks at either end of the keys


Next was the lid over the keys

The next piece goes on top of the key-lid and is the base where music rests
Here, I've put back two parts. There are two corner pillars that are screwed into the sides. Once I put those back, the front panel nests between them and is held in place by two little wooden wedges.

All back together with the addition of the lip that goes in front of the keys. This is screwed in from the bottom and was the first piece to come off.

When I had it all apart, I vacuumed up a lot of the dust and found some weird relics of past owners buried inside. Also, I found the missing hammer that had broken off from the high C. The process didn't do that much to improve the piano's sound, but I can tell it's much happier now. I guess more than anything it was just a bonding experience. My next task will be to actually tune it but that may not happen for a little while.