Piano

[Steve Haynie]

A friend is moving and has no place for a 19th Century Steinway upright. It looks like the piano will end up at my house for a while.

Does anyone know if Steinway had their uprights manufactured by another source? Someone told me this is a possibility.

It would be nice if my friend can sell the piano. Does anyone buy acoustic upright pianos anymore?

[Studio Custom]

1-800-STEINWAY

[hamerhead]

DO NOT volunteer to help move it.

[a.bandini]

There have been a few articles in the past couple years including this one from the New York Times (OK, this is a video, but there was also a written article, and BBC had one, too), about how people can't get rid of their old pianos, so there is an active market destroying them.

Kind of sad.

[JohnnyB]

Steinway in general made their own pianos. Sometimes they outsourced casework to Sohmer, another New York piano builder that did great cabinetry. Generally, upright pianos don't get rebuilt or restored the way grand pianos do, even Steinways. There are two reasons for this:

• The first is that a grand piano has a much better playing action and (depending on size) has a bigger tone and better dynamics.
• The second reason is that uprights don't lend themselves to rebuilding. Whereas on a grand piano you simply unhinge the lid to get full access to all working parts, on an upright everything is glued together in a case. You don't rebuild a piano without replacing the pinblock, but on an upright the pinblock is glued in and has to be chiseled out.

With a grand, once it's unstrung the pinblock pretty much lifts out. When you consider the destruction/reconstruction labor required to rebuild an upright combined with the prospect that for all the trouble it won't sound or play nearly as well as a grand, that pretty much means that once they reach 100 yrs old or so, unfortunately, they're ready for the dump. On the other hand, even 200 year old grand pianos (and certainly 100-150 yr-old ones) are worth rebuilding.