How to Fix Piano Hammers

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Tom Flowers of Well Tempered Piano Tuning here to talk to you about piano tuning and maintenance. We're looking at a grand piano action here. It sits on this key frame which holds everything together. The keys are held down for transport by this key stop. Each individual key is coming down on a pin. You can't see down here and it balances on a pin can see here on what we call the balance rail. The key is more or less a fulcrum. It lifts up the hammer, sends it and the whole action gets ready to play the next note. Well, in this case in general for a ninety-eight year old action, this isn't too bad. There are a number of lubrication things we could do to ease things up, get dust out, that sort of thing. As I look at it, the hammer line is a little bit out of kilter. As I've already noticed that this hammer is perfectly in line with the first set of strings in its section, I can simply use that to line up the rest of the hammers. In this case, this hammer is distinctly far to the left. So I simply loosen the screw, move it where I like it and tighten the screw. It's really pretty simple in that regard. This one's also too far to the left and we can do that. This one is simply loose. So as we get down here, number eighty-eight and this is very common, is broken because somebody probably pulled the action while holding down like this which sent the hammer up and as they pulled it out it caught on the stretcher and simply ripped the hammer right off. That's quite a simple repair. So we take the old hammer which is right here. Take a bit of super CA glue, as it's known, give it a good coating because wood is so porous it's going to accept a lot of the initial coating, as soon as we get the super glue open. Okay, a little trouble there and something never to be without is accelerator. It comes in a spray can and instantly activates the glue. So one you have the glue on, lift up the shank. Place it together. Have your accelerator ready and you'll actually feel the wood seat as I just did. This stuff smells awful but works incredibly and there we go."