It comes up less and less frequently the way all products go now, but BOY is it satisfying to fix a mechanical thing.
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Well done.. I appreciate the work in that from having watched my Dad in the early 80's restore more or less that model of player piano. It had pedal bellows, though. He got it professionally tuned; my sister learned to play on it and there's only so much a nerve can take.
I think our earliest piano roll was from the late 1890's.
Standard wake up call for teenagers sleeping in late was his tube stereo playing the Boston Pops version of "Stars and Stripes Forever", badly synchronized with the player piano which had it on a roll in (more or less) the same key.
Pet peeve in West World is sometimes the piano roll doesn't match up with what the piano is playing.
@TallSimon @virtualbri Yeah, I noticed that piano in WW was clearly faking the roll. Sometimes. Though sometimes it looked about right. My piano was foot pedal only. I modified it to accept suction from a shop vac on a variable control to slow it down as to not destroy the piano! This involved, after a lot of research and planning, cutting a small hole into the piano near the pedals to create an access point into the main bellows (without doing unwanted internal damage) and inserting a 3D printed flange to attach the vacuum hose. It was a very touchy operation.
@lauren That is FANTASTIC. And way more complex :)
@virtualbri Thanks. When I started I knew really nothing about pianos at all, much less players. There were a number of old books (that had full text on Google Books) dating back to the era that went into enormous detail about the mechanics of these devices, mostly written by this one guy who seemed to be THE expert at this stuff. Rather wordy in the style of the time but absolutely invaluable.
There turn out not to be many fixable original players around still. The boon was in the early to mid 20s, and the industry thought it had nowhere to go but up. It was devastated by the depression, and the phonograph and radio finished the job. The entire industry was wiped out almost overnight, and most players were trashed or sold as cheap upright pianos with the player mechanisms ripped out. It's a telling tale of almost instant tech obsolescence. There are quite a few rolls around in attics and basements still, luckily. That roll is by far my favorite, as played and captured by a brilliant but infamous French pianist who reportedly collaborated with the Nazis.
The tech in this unit is really amazingly advanced. For example, there are two tiny levers on either side of the roll reader bar. As the paper roll drifts to the right or left as it naturally would do, it touches a lever and a mechanism (that big double bellow to the left) adjusts the paper position in real time so the holes continue to be properly aligned to the reader openings. When I got it the unit was completely foot pedal operated. Ouch. I modified it so that it would operate from a shop vac on a rheostat. It is totally operated by that one vacuum source (or the pedals), nothing electric at all. The opposite of a traditional organ, which runs by blowing air out rather than sucking it in.
@lauren That is amazing. I never even thought about horizontal centering
@virtualbri I also tuned it myself, so that's why the tuning is pretty awful. I have it tuned below A440, to put a bit less stress on the harp.
@virtualbri My best mechanical revival. Now 100 years old! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYI8eGjDZG0