July 30, 2018
by Elizabeth Pike
The weekend of July 14 and 15, we used the organ exclusively because our piano was undergoing restoration. We did not expect it to be back until August, but our technician completed work early!
The Yamaha piano that we have at OLP is over 40 years old and other than tuning and very minor service, it has not had much maintenance completed on it; it is a great instrument to have served us so well for so long, but because of its age, it has been in need of some serious work. There are several parts to the piano, the first of which, restoration of the “piano action mechanism,” was completed these last two weeks. To talk about all the work that was done would make for a very long article, but I thought some might be interested to know a little bit about this. Essentially, the “action” on a piano involves the keys and hammers. When a key on the piano is pressed down, it causes the rapid motion of a hammer in the piano, which then strikes a string. Over time, the hammers of our piano became very worn and flat. The result of this, as you may have noticed, was that sometimes the piano would sound a little harsh compared to other pianos, especially in the lowest notes. To fix this, our piano technician removed the whole action mechanism from the piano and took it to his workshop. He replaced all of our hammers and then shaped each one properly, but the work was not done there. Each key also has to be weighted properly, so that the sound is uniform when the pianist strikes each key; because the hammers were replaced, our technician also had to adjust the piano’s touch, making sure the keys were properly weighted. As a result of this project, you will notice that the piano has a much warmer and fuller sound! It may take a while for your ears to adjust to this new sound. You may also notice that the upper part of the keyboard does not sound as loud, this is because, in the upper part of the keys a hardener (lacquer) is added to the hammer in the last three octaves, it takes a while to “cure” (harden or dry fully), but should function at about 80% in the first week, reaching 100% in two months.
The next phase for our piano will probably take place next summer when the piano's strings will be replaced! Thank you to everyone who gave generously to the fund for music maintenance in years past to make this much-needed project happen!
