Willetta's Spinet Piano's New Lives #1: Getting It Apart

There are easy things: The screws to the hinges of the top. The screws holding the keyboard cover on. The panel in the knee space. All these are a cinch.

The keys are not actually fastened in. They just rest on a bed of pins. (I’ll add that picture later.)

Then the remarkable part: The motion from a depressed key is translated through a number of pivoting, moving parts to finally reach the hammer which strikes the string (hence the classification of the piano as a percussion instrument). And this whole construction rolls up like a bamboo shade!

The deck on which the pin rack (for lack of a professional term) sits is just oak. The other internal materials are maple and the spruce soundboard. The latter is not salvageable in this spinet, anyway.

Once the strings are cut and removed with a die grinder and cutoff wheel, you’re left with removing the cast iron frame.

In order to accomplish this, every tuning pin must be removed completely. Though they don’t appear threaded as we know threaded, they actually have very shallow cuts in them and they back out quite readily if you have enough torque to get them started. That required a 1/2” Porter Cable corded drill.

Some screws and bolts hold in the cast iron frame but they were small challenges.

The frame weighs 105 lbs.

It went home in the truck. When Linda the Artist saw it, my idea of letting some shrubbery grow out of it (“Bring me a shrubbery!”) went away.

The current plan is to hang it on the wall in the music room. More of that unfolding adventure to follow.

-- "...in his brain, which is as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd with observation, the which he vents in mangled forms." --Shakespeare, "As You Like It"

That certainly is a thorough disassembly! I’ve done a couple myself (early 1900s uprights with ivory and ebony) but never went so far as to remove all the pins. What a job! We’ll be interested to see how you hang your “artwork.”