How to Remove the Key Frame

Video Transcript

On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Tom Flowers of Well Tempered Piano Tuning. I'm here to talk to you about piano tuning and maintenance. Now we're actually going to pull the action. The keys and all the action parts are sitting on what's called a key frame. It's also screwed into the key bed which I didn't notice before. So I'll need to grab a screwdriver and we'll pull that out. This is all kept together in a way so that the size and geometry of what's happening down here for the player matches what's happening and hits the right string. If that gets out even a little bit, that can be a real problem. You get the effects. So as I pull this out, keep in mind there's about seventy-seven parts per key and we have eighty-eight keys. So you can do the math and see that there's a lot of parts sitting here. There's also a lot of things in here that aren't supposed to be in here. Now, as I pull it out, there are a number of things not traditionally. In piano school I didn't learn anything about how many straws or spoons need to be in a piano. I think the approximate number though is zero and oh, here's some pens and we're going to take this out as carefully as we can and here we go. Now, as we get closer, because you see the keys extend into the back under the action parts and we'll talk about those in a moment. This is called a key stop. It's the only job in life is to keep the keys from wedging out and becoming stuck when this piano is turned on its spine side for moving which is how pianos are moved. So while it's in the piano, it doesn't really do anything. It's very important before a piano move. I get lots of calls to straighten out keys because that wasn't in place. So as we pull it out, we have to make sure that the hammers aren't catching under what we call the stretcher. And okay, we have a few stubborn ones and here we go. So there is the complete action. Eighty-eight hammers on flanges and shanks with what's called a whippet underneath. All of this adds up to being able to play a string, hit a string and being able to hit it again.

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