Should Your Rebuild Your Piano

Or Purchase A Rebuilt/Refurbished Piano?

Should You Rebuild Your Piano, or Purchase A Refurbished Piano?

When families, piano students and players need a good-sounding, well functioning piano for their home or studio, they actually have 4 choices:

1. Buy a new piano with full warranty
2. Buy a used piano in its present condition
3. Buy an older used piano that’s already been completely rebuilt
4. Buy an older used piano in poor or run-down condition and pay to have it rebuilt yourself.
And of course, if you already own a piano that is older, and most of the parts are wearing out, causing poor sound & touch, you can add a fifth possibility to our list of choices
5. Rebuild your existing piano

Obviously, the first two choice are the easiest to undertake. Choice 3 can also be easy enough as long as you can verify the competence and quality of the rebuilder and his work.
Here, as in our earlier post about buying a used piano, one caveat cannot be overstressed: Take an expert technician with you who has the experience to accurately gauge to rebuilders skill level and qulaity of their work.

But choices 4 and 5 are tricky, and require deep assessment to determine whether or not any given piano warrants rebuilding.

First, let’s clarify what is meant by rebuilding a piano. Rebuilding a used piano, also reffered to as piano restoration or refurbishing, is the process of gutting the instrument of all it’s worn out parts, and replacing them with fresh new parts.

There are different levels of rebuilding. In some cases, simply replacing the hammers, dampers, key & action felts, and all the strings, is enough. In the restoration of much older instruments, it may also be necessary to replace many wooden action parts like the hammershanks, wippens, springs, damper levers, and even the wooden keys or keyframe, as well as cutting, fitting and drilling a new tuning pin block.

So rebuilding often may start with gutting the piano all the way down to the bare cabinet, iron plate, soundboard and bridges. As mentioned in the earlier post, full soundboard/bridge replacement is rare for most “piano shop rebuilders,” usually a factory job.

Rebuilding usually takes place in the piano technicains shop, for considerations of space, noise, messiness, and the tech’s access to all his heavy and technical tools. But, if it’s strictly an easier-level rebuilding job (just restringing and action-parts replacement) with no refinishing of the cabinet included, some rebuilders will offer to bring their tools and parts to the home and carry out the work there, saving the owner back-and-forth cartage fees.

Obviously, this is a LOT of work, usually consuming 4-8 weeks and costing from $3,000 to $10,000, depending on the type of instrument (old upright or fine grand) and depth of restoral needed. And that’s just for the inner restoral; we haven’t added the thousands for professional refinishing of the case.

With those kind of figures, it’s obvious that full piano rebuilding only make senses in a few instances. In our next post, let’s take a look at when rebuilding is warranted.
 

For more check out these related posts

• Should You Rebuild Your PIano 2?