It’s apparently customary for piano tuners to annotate their work on the keys, starting after the serial numbers on the bass notes at the left end:
After admiring that, you can pop the hammer links off with a prybar:
All 88 keys stack neatly into a Home Depot Extra Small moving box, filling it about 2/3 full, starting with the bass keys on the bottom:
I harvested the lovely wood panels, then the scrapper hauled the carcass to the transfer station. Perhaps it raised the secret chord when it hit the bottom …
Lest you wonder why we didn’t try to contact X, who would surely be interested in a free piano: we did. Believe me, we tried, for many values of X, only to find nobody wants a piano in this day and age.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
3 responses to “Play Like A Barbarian”
Aye. Finding a home for a musical instrument larger than a guitar* can be a hell of a job. My mother was successful when she moved out of her condo in 1987, but it was still a difficult search.
((*)) Sometimes, I think anything larger than a piccolo would be a challenge, and even that might be difficult.
They said it couldn’t be done, but a couple of years ago I cut up an upright Kimball piano into small enough chunks to throw out with the regular trash.
The tuning pegs proved particularly difficult. They have what appears to be the finest threads I have ever seen held by friction alone in their holes. Unscrewing them even with an impact gun was surprisingly difficult. After removing a handful, I decided to take my chances cutting the strings with an angle grinder. The cast iron frame looked to be a tough cookie, but broke into pieces with a couple of whacks with a sledge hammer. What remained was removing a million screws and cutting up the oak body with a circular saw.
A tough job, but not nearly as doing the same to a 1950’s vintage fold out bed. The sheared ends of dozens of springs and attached wiring was like sticking your arm in a sharks mouth. I’ll show you the scars if you have the time.
They sure don’t make ’em like they used to.
[…] piano keys seem familiar, the thing in the middle looks eerily like a PDP-11 front panel, and … could that be a folding […]