Weber 88-note pianola restoration blog

"Trapwork" is the term used for the sustain and half-blow (loud and soft) pedals and their mechanisms, which are situated in the bottom of the piano. In a player piano they are situated alongside the supports for the bellows and pumping pedal assembly. This part of the piano tends to be the dirty secret of the pianola - all the dirt collects there, and it is likely to be the dampest part of the instrument so items tend to get rusty.

The pictures show how initially everything was quite worn, rusty, moth-eaten and generally in poor shape. The piano pedals were badly tarnished (and the surface dezincified so that they were a matt chestnut brown instead of polished brass), and the felt linings around the pedals had largely disappeared. The pedal crank rods were rusty and the paint had come off.

All the cloth bushings (bearings) were replaced with new bushing cloth, though some of the bushings (the ones for the hand controls, see below) proved to be too thick and had to be re-bushed with thinner cloth.

The piano pedals could not be removed (they must have been put in place before the bottom board was fitted to the piano) so these were de-rusted, painted and polished in situ.

The bottom board of the piano was thoroughly cleaned (it was, predictably, filthy) and re-coated with black shellac, making it look considerably more respectable!

The openings for the pedals were re-lined with check felt on the tops and sides and with backrest baize at the bottom.

The "cradles" for the bellows unit were originally lined with 2mm hard felt; this was not easy to replicate as it doesn't seem to be available now, so 5mm soft felt was (with limited success) steam-pressed down to 2mm. It was still a little soft and tended to ruck up when fitting the bellows unit, but after a little trimming (and after leaving the bellows unit in place for a few days) the felt compacted well enough to fit. This felt may get replaced in the future if something more suitable can be found.

I expected this to be a fairly quick job but in fact it seemed to take for ever! The hand controls operate the sustain and half blow (soft) pedal mechanisms as you obviously can't operate those pedals while pumping with the pianola pedals. They also operate the bass and treble subduing mechanism in the expression box, the tempo and the reroll.

The controls themselves are made of brass and the linkages are nickel-plated steel. Although the knobs didn't look too bad, the rest of the brasswork was covered in corrosion and filth, and the steel had rusted badly and lost much of the nickel plating. Indeed, the round rods used in various places were badly pitted through rust. Also, small leather washers are used to provide padding at the riveted pivots, and some of these had disintegrated or vanished entirely; these were made anew and carefully manipulated into place over the rivet heads (and in one case between the assembled components, needing a lot of stretching of the leather!).

Predictably, the felt around the hand control slots was worn and moth-eaten, though the hard felt used to limit the travel of the levers was fine so I left well alone. The usual thin, soft felt (e.g. nameboard felt) would not have been up to the job so some hard felt was sanded down (taking precautions for dust) and was pressed after steaming to turn it into a very hard, thin layer suitable for lining the hand control slots. The control panel (actually the key slip) looked dull and had some damaged polish, but this was built up carefully with more french polish and after reviving with T-cut it looks very good indeed, especially with the slots relined!

The brasswork took a lot of polishing to get it looking respectable, and indeed some fairly heavy application of fine steel wool was needed to remove the very fine pink copper layer left behind due to dezincification of the surface of the brass. Some of the knobs have pivoted paddles and these were generally seized, so with extreme care the screws were removed, the slots in the screws cleaned up and the paddles cleaned. The knobs were carefully polished with a mild abrasive and re-lacquered then re-assembled.

Evaporust (applied via kitchen-roll "bandages" and wrapped in plastic bags to prevent evaporation) was used to remove the rust from the linkages. Several treatments were needed as the rust was quite severe. To avoid damage to the existing leather washers, these were treated with leather oil before Evaporusting. The flat steel linkages generally looked reasonable after rust removal so were lacquered, and the horizontal and vertical pivoting rods cleaned up well with rust removal; however, the small round steel push/pull rods were too far gone for that treatment so were primed with cellulose lacquer, sprayed with automotive silver paint then given a top coat of acrylic lacquer. The finished result is sufficiently close in appearance to 100-year-old nickel plating in good condition as to be pretty convincing.

This part of a restoration would normally be undertaken by a professional piano technician and (to be honest) I'd suggest going that route rather than trying to do it yourself; it is tedious and there are many pitfalls. The only reasons I took this on were (a) because my own piano technician was very supportive, as was another friend in the piano/pianola trade; (b) because restoration of this piano would not have been economic to get undertaken by a professional (as was obvious to my friendly technicians!); and (c) I wanted to learn, and it is strongly recommended that anyone doing DIY piano restoration practices on a scrap piano destined for the dump, as a beginner will be very likely to wreck it in the process of the "restoration". This was (at the outset) such a piano, and the fact that it has not been a total disaster is very much down to my supportive friends!

This part of the restoration is not described in detail but the picture carousel shows some typical stages including "before and after" images.

This project began when the blogger was seeking an instrument requiring full restoration in order to generate training materials and to hone his skills, and heard of this instrument being disposed of very locally. As with any player piano, there are essentially two parts to the instrument and therefore to any restoration: the piano itself (which differs only in fine detail from a conventional piano), and the player action which plays the piano from the roll. The instrument had a very promising sound, probably the equal of any I've played, but was in extremely poor condition, requiring both the piano and the player action to be fully restored. The blog picks up on the project at the end of the piano restoration and just before the player restoration.