Piano Repair and Tuning: What to Look for in a Second Hand Piano (Tuning Pegs, Cracked Backing Planks)

You can buy an old vintage piano for $400. I know, because I just sold one. But how do you know if it’s worth buying? Will it be fixable and ok for your child to learn? You need to know what to look for.

The tuning chart and tuning pegs on my Moore & Moore upright piano looked excellent. It was one of the best I’d seen in that regard: there was no evidence of damaged or abused pins, they all looked original, none had been hammered, none had marks, were not bent, and there were no signs of cracks or other damage to the plank. support. The soundboard (the largest piece of wood, behind the strings in the center of the instrument) also had no cracks and all the strings looked good. The action (the moving parts) worked well on all notes, and the dampers stopped the sound of each note when you lifted the key or lifted the damper pedal. A plastic key was missing, but it would be easy to replace. Most vintage pianos wouldn’t look as nice on the inside.

Then a couple of weeks later I got a complaint from the very disappointed buyer:

“Hello Margaret. After the piano was delivered to us, we bought a piano tuner and were very disappointed…it couldn’t tune…when the tuner tried to push the pegs they would immediately unwind and she said it was nothing well… so we rented a piano. When the boys came out to deliver the [new] piano also said “No, that’s cactus…”

But the piano was actually quite tuneable, and the internals were in very good condition. Eventually, after more advice from me, the buyer realized that he had found a very useful tool.

The skill of the tuner is critical to keeping the strings and tuning pegs ‘in tune’. When I lived in the remote town of Karratha, I taught myself to tune a very old piano in much worse shape than this one. I also did some tuning on a couple of my students’ old pianos. In all cases it was very difficult to keep them in tune for more than a few minutes, partly due to my poor technique with the tuning hammer. However, when a professional tuner came to town, he did a wonderful job and the three rickety old pianos stayed in tune for many months.

When a piano has not been tuned for a few years, it may require more than one tuning to ‘get in tune’. It’s impossible to know how well this will work, you can only try it and see how many tunings it takes. The strings have tons of tension and you have to wait for the tension to even out before you do another tuning. It can take months for the tuning to settle.

When he bought my Moore & Moore piano I told him it needed to be rehydrated (needed more water or moisture in the wood). If the wrestling board had dried, the pins would surely be loose. At Karratha we rehydrated the three old pianos and it made a BIG difference. The simple cure is to place a beaker of water inside the piano at the bottom. The bigger the better, because people tend to forget about them and eventually run out of water. It takes weeks to take effect. This rehydration also seemed to fix an action issue two of our pianos had. Some tuners don’t like water glasses, they think it will cause problems with the action or rust the strings, so advice from a professional technician should be sought, but it worked fine for us. There are commercially available humidifiers/dehumidifiers made especially for pianos.

Another inexpensive technique to help with tuning is to hammer the pegs into the wrestling board. It’s a standard remedy, but there is a limit to how much and how often the pins can be hammered out. The pegs on this old piano looked like they had never been hammered in, so it was still a viable option. This is definitely a job for a skilled piano technician, to avoid damage to the pegs or breakout board.

A much more expensive technique is to replace the pegs with larger pegs (they come in different sizes), but it would be quite a chore and cheaper to get another piano.

In the end the buyer was very happy with his piano, it turned out to be a pretty good instrument.