Inspecting a Piano Pin Block

Video Transcript

"Right now we're talking about the pins and the pin block. As you can see, all these are pins. The strings are attacked to the pins. This is how we tune each and every string. This is what the pin looks like. This is what the pin looks like. And along here are threads. Very, very small threads. This allows you to tune the piano precisely. This is embedded into wood like this. Here's the pin here. And as you see, the pin is embedded into many, many ply wood. There's a lot of different styles of this, but this is the main one where it's a dark wood and a light wood, dark wood, light wood. And they're all like this. You turn this, string is attached to this, and you tune the piano. This is your pin block. It rests on top of your soundboard, held up by the posts. This block is, on this piano, this thick. It goes all the way out to the front. The pins stick in through here. This gives a good, solid hunk of wood for the pins to grip those strings. It's thousands of pounds of pressure on this--on the harp, and on the actual sounding board, and the whole piano. A lot of pressure. Therefore, you want a nice, big, big hunk of wood. This wood is done in ply. There are different techniques of doing it, meaning that you've got a lot of different types of woods layered in and some layered in like this, makes for a very strong base for the pin to hold on to. The pin block."