Please don't be embarrassed. Pianos are great collectors of dust and dirt and after about 100 years there is only so much you can do! I promise that it will all clean when we return your baby.

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This is your pinblock.

And this is why your piano couldn't stay in tune. The pinblock is riddled with these cracks.

The pinblock is out.

The underlever system is out. You can see the crown of the belly.

This is from a different Steinway O, but you can clearly see a problem here. The underlever system that Steinway used at this time had many disasters waiting to happen. The flanges were glued onto the top of the rail and if they came unglued you could potentially need to remove the entire system to do an effective repair. The tabs (red felt sticking out of the heads) also became hard and noisy. Other than that they were great.

You can see the shadows from the bass strings. Even after cleaning there is a very light shadowing.

As you can see, we are cutting YOUR pin block.

The block has been fit and now I am marking all of the holes which need to be very precisely drilled; over 250 holes total.

All of the holes have been marked

We use a two step drilling process. We first drill a .250 pilot hole and then redril with the final size bit. This allows the bit to stay much cooler during the final pass. The holes are much more even because we don't have the drill bit expanding from heat and wobbling during chip ejection.

The pin block is in! Next comes the refinishing.