Restoring the Blüthner
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I found this series of restauration videos interesting due to the innovative use of tools, some of them invented and built by the guy himself.
There are English (well, kind of) subtitles.
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Hmm... I didn't see a single tool or technique that was any different from any run of the mill refurbishing. It's not actually a rebuild because he kept the old pinblock and simply used oversized pins, and he didn't install a new soundboard. What he did is not a rebuild, it's a "refurbishing". That soundboard is crap. Any more than 3 cracks needs replaced, not cosmetics. Even if it had been worth saving (which it wasnt) he should have sanded the old varnish off the entire board, bleached the wood so it all matched, and then refinished the entire board.
With that piece of Swiss cheese for a soundboard and oversized pins in an old pinblock, geez....
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Enjoyed the 3 videos but...
I think the soundboard should have been replaced. The amount of labor involved in doing the repair was just too much and it looked like crap when he was finished.
Manually creating the felt donuts? Wow. That's some tedious shit right there.
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@larry said in Restoring the Blüthner:
I didn't see a single tool or technique that was any different from any run of the mill refurbishing.
I can't really comment on whether he did a good job or not, or whether it would have been better to replace the soundboard, but with regard to tools, I've never seen, for instance, vacuum pumps being used for the clamping blocks, or the tool he built for drilling into the hammer heads, or the device he built for aligning the hammer heads after gluing.
Also, whether a soundboard with many cracks should be replaced or repaired seems to be a contested issue. For instance, this piano builder argues that one should basically never replace it because it would then be a different piano, not a Bechstein or Steinway or whatever it was originally. I'm not saying I agree with the guy; I merely notice that opinions on that matter seem to diverge among piano technicians.
I believe there is even a law over here that a piano builder cannot sell a piano with the original brand name anymore when he has replaced the soundboard. It's legally no longer a Blüthner, or Bechstein or whatever.
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@klaus ok, i have to confess that i only watched the first 2 videos and halfway into the 3rd one, bbecause up to that point i hadn't seen anything different from what every other rebuilder does. I went back and finished video 3, and had i watched the whole video i would have answered differently. I stand corrected about the action regulation tools.
I'm also aware of the arguments pro and con about new vs old soundboard. My opinion is that saving an old, shot soundboard because "it is no longer a _______ brand if you replace the old board" is 90% B.S. ITS already no longer the same soundboard as it was when it was installed at the factory. A perfect condition soundboard that's 50 years old (or 2 years old, or 20 years old) with no cracks is no longer the same soundboard it was when it was first installed. The argument is that wood "improves tonally" as it ages. That's all well and good if we're talking about a string instrument... but a piano is not a string instrument, it's a percussion Instrument. As such, its far more important that the "crown" of the board is correct than any tonal differences. That's my opinion, at least. And the odds that a board that old with that many cracks in it still has the original crown is slim to none.
That said, German re builders must be formally trained in their craft, and in the US anyone can hang out a shingle and call themselves a piano tuner. So there is no question that this man is highly skilled. So I admit to having not watched the last half of the 3rd video, and didn't see the tools you mention.
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@larry I don't disagree with you here. It's a little like the story from the ship of Theseus: If you replace every part over time, at what point does it become a different ship? In my experience, if one is considering a rebuilt piano, then the quality of the technician who worked on the piano is at least as important as the name on the fallboard.
From what I understand, Steinway makes a big fuzz about repairs only being done with "original Steinway" parts - which is presumably a strategy that is just as much motivated by profits than it is about concern for old pianos. I recently heard a piano technician from my area bitching about Steinway buying parts like hammers or strings from standard companies (Renner,Abel,Kluge,...) and then reselling them for twice the price as "original Steinway".
