Friday, August 19, 2011

Old Player Pianos

Did you know that I am one of the few people in all of South Florida that does antique player piano restoration? There aren't many people in the country with experience working on those old pneumatic players. These days, with everything going digital, there are hardly any technicians who can tell the difference between a player motor and the stack.

A little bit about the player piano:

They suck...literally. The bellows compress and then open, literally drawing, sucking, air through the mechanism at various points. The bellows draw air through the motor and through the tracking bar, that bar with holes in it that the roll goes over. Air is drawn into the tracker through those holes on the paper roll, through the air tight stack with 88 full pneumatics, one for each key, 88 valves, and 88 smaller pneumatics that operate the valves.

The roll and tracker are driven by the motor and transmission. The motor is right beside the transmission, which is attached to the roll box. The transmission is an assembly of gears and chains while the motor is a box with four or five pneumatics on it, driven by a curled piece of metal. That's the basic layout of the player piano.

The player piano was invented in 1863 and was a mechanism that literally rolled up to the piano, pneumatic fingers hovering above the keyboard and played the piano in that manner.