Cleaning 80 Years of Dust From a Piano

hello everyone this is Josiah Jackson also known as the piano doctor and I found this piano that was extremely filthy pretty far out of tune had a few keys that weren't working right and it even had some water damage as well which can be a huge problem for pianos so right now I'm working on taking everything apart that way I can clean out the inside of the piano you can see all the dust that's been building up over the past 80 years the owners were really sentimental about this piano and they've had it for a really long time and I reached out to them and asked if I could do the cleaning and repairs for free they said that before I came to work for them they thought they might have to throw away the piano and if you stick around at some point in the video you can actually hear their reactions but for now I'm working on getting off the board that covers the keys and I actually had a very hard time with this one it probably took me around 15 minutes or so because the left side was basically glued in place and the owner actually came over to check it out and see if I needed any help eventually I did get it and you can see that there are some kids toys stuff down inside of here along with some pencils as well if your keys are making any clicking noises or any of them are sticking this is typically the first thing that I'll check for because it is really common to find things that are dropped behind that board that covers the keys the next step I do here is take out the screws this will allow What's called the action of the piano to slide out it's basically the mechanism that's triggered when you press the key it transfers all the energy from your finger to a hammer that in the end hits the strings so now I can actually slide out the mechanism and I always try and be really careful here so I don't break anything I like to take this part of the piano outside whenever possible and use an air compressor to blow off all the dust this is actually one of my favorite parts of my job is pulling out an action from the piano as customers might be sitting on their couch or something but almost inevitably every time they'll stand out and walk over to see how cool it looks up close here I'm vacuuming up some of the insulation that had fallen from a leak in the roof and you can see some water stains from that as well as mentioned before water damage can be a huge problem for pianos the good news though is that the mechanism of the piano surprisingly seemed to not have any major issues I guess that is other than the dampers but we'll get to those later for now I'm just trying to clean up the bulk of the Dust by using the air compressor and vacuum and trying to keep it mostly contained because it can get really dusty while doing this process and I always recommend that the owner cleans up a little bit after I'm done because inevitably it gets quite dirty okay The Next Step that I take in this process is grabbing some non-alcoholic baby wipes and I have to make sure they are non-alcoholic 100 because if you use alcoholic it will actually dry out the wood like a ton have cracks in the piano it's just not a good scenario but this part of the cleaning is probably the most satisfying it does take a while normally around an hour or so but it is well worth it in the end I think it is partly because I was filming but this piano took around three hours just for cleaning under the string the buildup of the Dust was pretty extreme on this one and I basically had to scrape a lot of it off one interesting fact I guess is that I always have to clean the piano before I tune it because otherwise when I'm from inserting all these tools and moving it around you can bend some of the wires and stuff and it can make the tuning go away also if you do have a grand piano I will have what's called a soundboard cleaner linked below it's not exactly like the tools that I'm using this one doesn't require you to tune the piano after so it's perfectly safe for the piano and all it is is just to get up the bulk of the dust and you don't have to have a piano tuner actually do this so if you do have a grand piano it's a good option for you to try and keep this area of your piano cleaned it's really cheap and I don't earn much money off of it but if you do purchase it I earn a small commission so if you want to support the channel that's a great way to do that just a little bit you'll hear the customer's reaction but I just want to say a quick thank you to everybody who's been watching my videos and liking them and subscribing you guys have seriously I'm not joking you've literally changed the route of my life and where it's going right now so thank you so much and please continue to watch And subscribe and enjoy the videos it really does help the channel out a whole lot anyway the owners came over to talk to me for a little bit and here is their reaction so once you cleared up all that dust you could see it a lot better sure yeah and this one didn't come perfectly clean so it's a little bit sad but I think that's the best it's okay this is an old baby yeah yeah it is she's lived well yeah it's doing pretty well and I think once we get it tuned I don't know if I'll have time to do it today so I'll probably have to run back another time but once we get that done then it'll be in much much better shape guys so excited I'm so glad that you were able to do this first yeah that's fun all right how you doing okay back to cleaning and just a quick note for any other piano tuners out there who may be watching this video or who have seen any of my other videos I don't use a lot of technical lingo on purpose just to try and keep it available to the public and so that they can understand what I'm talking about another thing is if you have any advice feel free to leave it in the comments I'm only 19 and I don't pretend to have all the answers but anyway that wraps up the cleaning part and right here you can see the before and after but don't leave yet because we still have the before and after of the entire piano coming up after we finish the tuning and repairs okay it's day two and I'm back again doing some repairs on the dampers I just need to take everything apart again so I can start working on them right here you can see a lot of the dampers are returning slow and some of them are even getting stuck and the problem with that is once you press a key the note will just keep sounding because there's nothing to come back and stop the string from vibrating anymore so to fix this I grabbed some of my special made piano technician oil and it drives the moisture out of the wood and the felt that is supporting those dampers and it just smoothens up the process so they return like so now we're on to the final step and that is tuning the piano here are the tools that I use I have my trusty grand piano tuning lever some tuning mutes that mute off the strings that I don't want to sound because there's actually three strings per note and an app called tune lab that helps me with the whole process and in this next clip I'm actually oiling up all of the tension points on the string this just allows for a little bit more stable of a tuning finally I take some measurements to see how this unique piano should be tuned and then it's time to get started now that I'm at the section with two strings per note once I take this mute out hear both notes Clash pretty hard my job is to make sure both of those strings sound like one note as I was moving my way up tuning the piano I noticed some of the tuning pins on this section of the piano seemed a little bit loose aside from rebuilding the entire piano there's a couple ways to fix this one of those is to grab this special glue that I get from a piano technician supply house and add it around the base of the tuning pens this gives them a little bit more to grab onto so that they'll stay in place and ultimately the piano will stay in tune long after that I tuned the bass section again and I ran through the whole piano technically I tuned the whole piano two and a half times so that it would actually stay in tune and with that here's the before and after of the entire piano thank you [Music]

Channel: The Piano Doctor

Views: 1,329,265

Keywords: Piano Tuning, Piano repair, the piano doctor, Josiah Jackson, The Piano Dr., Piano restoration, repair timelapse, cleaning Timelapse, cleaning a piano, piano cleaning, Piano doctor

Id: acttLIgCO-s

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2023