I Almost Saved The Piano
That time I said goodbye to a 100+ year old Heintzman
A few years ago I moved out of a house that was being torn down and I found myself responsible for the destiny of an old Heintzman piano.
I had lived with the antique for years and grew fond of its beautiful craftsmanship. The old wood radiated vibes from another time. And they were good vibes.
I’m no piano player, but sometimes I’d plunk the keys like a drunken sailor and pretend I was Elton on the brink of a new song. Despite my inabilities, it sounded gorgeous and resonated beautifully in that room.
It was good company and felt like an old friend.
The old piano needed some TLC though. Many of the notes were out of tune and some of the ivory tops were missing.
I was resigned to the fact I couldn’t take it with me. As I prepared to move, I tried to find it a new home. I put ads on social media and offered it for free.
But I knew moving a piano isn’t cheap. So offering it for free still meant it came with a price tag.
A Potential Home Emerges
One interested person reached out. She was excited at the idea of having a vintage piano in her house.
“I’d like my kids to learn to play,” she said over email. “I think it will be good for them to grow up around it.” She loved the idea of the old instrument joining her family.
“I plan to bring a piano tech with me to look at its condition,” she continued in the email. “Do you mind? I’ll pay for him myself.”
When she arrived at my door I could tell she was enthusiastic about giving the piano a loving home. She gasped when she entered the room and approached it.
“It’s so beau-ti-ful,” she said, stretching out the word for effect.
A seasoned piano tech accompanied her for the inspection and quickly got to work. He sat down on the bench and told us how much he loved working on old pianos. And he’d been doing so for many years. She looked at me and smiled as he spoke. Her giddiness was palpable and it made me happy.
I had found the piano a good home.
After a half hour of tinkering and careful review, the tech spun around to us on the piano bench. With both hands planted firmly beside his hips, he slowly shook his head while looking at us. He began to break the news: The vintage instrument was just too far gone.
“Even if you put a thousand dollars into it, the ongoing maintenance would not be worth it,” he said.
“At some point these old things become too difficult and costly to maintain. Time catches up to them.” He paused and curled his lower lip, sympathetic to our disappointment. “It’s such a shame. This old piano has run out of life.”
With that, the adoption fell through and the disappointed duo left the house.
And they left me staring at the aged monolith in the living room.
And so, Plan B
With no new prospects and time not on my side, I started to think about my best course of action to get the piano out of the house.
I began to think about a disassembly. A deconstruction.
“What would it take to pull this thing apart, piece by piece?” I wondered.
The thought pained me though. I felt like I was contemplating an awful crime.
“I suppose I could salvage as many pieces as possible,” I thought. The idea of preserving some of the parts started to make me feel better. I was desperate to justify my ill intentions.
So I went about creating a plan to take it apart.
Where would I start?
Step 1: Remove some wood and get at the strings
The top of the piano came off by undoing a few screws. The beautifully engraved wood on the front was also easy to remove. I carefully extracted the boards and held them up, my arms outstretched. I paused with each of them to admire the craftsmanship.
This was going to be a slow death and I was determined to remain respectful to the old piano.
I set the boards aside.
I was feeling okay about this.
Step 2: Remove the strings
I quickly realized I could not do this by hand.
Like other stringed instruments, pianos have tuning pegs where the strings are wound and tuned. These pegs were made of metal and were incredibly difficult to turn, even with vice grips. I speculated this was because they hadn’t been touched in years.
And there were so many of them.
Although there are 88 keys on a piano, there are many more strings; usually about 230.
This was all new to me.
Each of the pegs is screwed into a giant harp. The harp is made of cast iron and is the backbone of the piano.
The soul, really.
It’s also where most of the weight comes from. The mighty tension on all those strings would buckle the piano if it wasn’t for the harp’s cast iron strength holding everything together.
I realized fighting to unscrew 230 metal pegs and carefully remove strings was feeling a bit daunting.
So I got some wire cutters.
Having restrung guitars for the majority of my life, I probably could have thought this through a bit more. I should have considered what happens when you cut high tension wire. And after the first snip, I remembered.
I also realized I needed safety glasses and as much skin coverage as possible.
“P-TING!” the broken strings echoed in the empty living room as they exploded apart, one by one, each with its unique tone.
The sound was almost unbearable.
I felt the sting of the strings as they hit me.
I started to think the old piano was intentionally lashing out at me.
Step 3: Keyboard and hammers
My next move was to extract the keys and the mechanism that lunges the felt hammers toward the now broken strings. This step got me back on track as it was relatively easy to do.
The mechanics of this part of the piano left me in awe and gave me pause.
Each tiny piece was beautifully handcrafted and expertly assembled. I stopped and carefully examined the assembly as it moved in my hands like an intricate puppet that flowed with a life of its own.
I noticed a few inscriptions signed in pencil. One from 1899 and another from Dec 11, 1936. The latter also had the address of a Miss C. O’Brien.
I looked up Miss O’Brien’s address and there are 512 Cooper streets in both Ottawa and Toronto, so it’s hard to say where this piano was played at Christmas in 1936.
I envisioned Miss O’Brien’s family and friends around the piano in their living room, singing Christmas carols by candlelight in the midst of the Great Depression.
I marvelled at how many stories must’ve been locked up inside this old piano.
Step 4: What next?
With the majority of the moving parts out of the way and the beast stripped back to its frame, I saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. There were just a few more pieces to go.
Or so I thought.
Little did I realize the piano’s soul was battle-ready.
I studied the remaining frame like I was preparing for a critical chess move.
The more I studied, the more I realized this wasn’t going to be easy. Unlike an IKEA shelf of a similar size, this beast was held together by some sort of 19th century wizardry and weighed as much as a compact car.
There were no other wood screws visible and no obvious way forward for my deconstruction plan. What was keeping it all together?
“There’s gotta be glue in there,” I thought to myself. “Glue, and who knows what else.”
I was done for the evening and I needed to sleep on this one.
I also knew I needed to find a sledgehammer.
Find Part 2 of this story here. Thanks for reading!