Piano restoration is a real art that requires years of experience. There are no shortcuts and if you have a treasured instrument, you’ll want the best possible service for your instrument. A good restoration can not only breathe life into your piano, it can add years to its overall life.
Here at the Piano Shop Bath we are extremely lucky to have assembled a team of technicians and specialists who have years of experience to draw upon with every job. Our polisher Phil has been polishing wood and pianos for over 40 years and the knowledge he brings to every piano restoration is invaluable. Phil has been recently working on a Steinway Model O grand piano that has come into our workshop, a piano which revealed many cautionary tales for any piano owner considering restoration.
This Steinway grand piano came into the workshop with one side of the piano completely faded from over-exposure to sunlight. It had the effect of bleaching the dark Rosewood veneer to the point where it was almost unrecognisable. When positioning a piano in a room, direct sunlight must always be avoided for this reason. In addition, the heat from direct sunlight can evaporate the natural humidity in your piano requires for stability and this will knock your piano out of tune very quickly.
Phil’s first task was to sand the existing polish coat back down to the Rosewood veneer. This has to be sanded by hand as typical chemical strippers tend to negatively affect Rosewood and cause unsightly discolouration. Once the veneer has been reached, a further level of fine hand-sanding is required to remove the bleached layer of Rosewood. Knowing how much to sand is something you can only know from years of experience; if you over-sand too deep into the veneer, the results are extremely damaging.
Unfortunately there was an example on this Steinway piano of a previous restoration attempt that had not taken care with the sanding. You can see very clearly in these pictures an area on the lid of the piano where sanding was too coarse and had actually gone through the veneer. This will now require further investigation to repair and if it proves serious enough, will require a completely new piece of veneer to be applied.
The results of expert hand-sanding is quite remarkable and you can see on the next picture an example of before and after the process. At the bottom, you can see the top half of the piano leg which has yet to be sanded. It appears completely bleached and devoid of any of the characteristic Rosewood colour. The top half is where the piano case meets the leg and this part has been fine-sanded to remove the discoloured layer. It reveals a beautiful grain that has a rich dark brown tone that we all associate with a fine Rosewood. This has yet to be polished, so the final result will be even more spectacular.
For polisher Phil, patience and experience are the key ingredients for a successful restoration of a piano’s wood. In his words, wood is an organic material that requires love and care. Any shortcuts will result in a poor finish that is obvious to everyone.
