Everyone in our house plays the piano so we thought it was a good idea to pick up a free piano listed on a local list serve. With the help of my brother, his truck, and six other guys, we got the piano home. The real winners in this situation were the previous owners who got the piano moved out of their house for free. Upon inspection, we found that most of the keys were chipped, it was badly out of tune, the soft pedal wasn't attached, the damper pedal only worked on some of the keys, some keys were sticking, and the bottom of the bench was broken. I figured this was a good opportunity to try some things I would never try on a piano in better shape. First, I fixed the bottom of the piano bench with some wood glue and nails. Next, I took off each key to clean and file it down to remove as much of the chipped edges as possible. I cleaned out underneath the keys as well which solved the sticking keys problem (that part was pretty gross). Some of the felt pads had deteriorated so I bought some felt and made replacement pads.
At this point we could put music in the bench and play the keys without cutting our fingers or having the keys stick. It still sounded terrible. I watched some YouTube videos and got some ideas of how to reattach and adjust the pedals which worked pretty well. Some of the notes still do not respond to the damper pedal which means there are other issues with those individual notes. I ordered a tuning kit online and with the help of apps and my instrument tuner, I was able to tune most of the keys. The bottom and top five notes would not register with the tools I was using, but we don't play those notes enough to justify spending money on software for the problem so I just made sure the notes were progressive, hehe. Tuning is a very tedious process because most of the notes have two or three strings which each have to be tuned individually. I did not do this in one day (and in case you are wondering, songs played on a partly-tuned piano sound even worse than a fully out-of-tune piano).
Overall, the piano looks and sounds better than it did before, so I will call it a success. It's not perfect, but I learned a lot about piano's!
