Hello, I am a new member of the community and I write from Italy, so I excuse in advancefor my english.
I am not a professional piano technician but during this last year when I had so few possibilities of having a normal life and so much available time, working on pianos has been one of the things that allowed me to keep a decent mind equilibrium.
Some months ago I found an ad of an used grand piano for about 500 usd (obviously it was in euros), and I bought it without hesitations. Sometimes I can be very impulsive.
It was a 1927 Sohmer Cupid, the keyboard was half stuck and the pedal lyre and the music desk were missing, but the soundboard was in good condition, the bridges were ok, all the strings were at their place and the general appearance was acceptable.
I had never heard of Sohmer before, and as I checked later, these pianos are essentially unknown in European market.
When I could extract the keyboard and the action (not easily, as many hammers were stuck in high position) I realised that the keyboard problem was worse than I could imagine, as the leads were heavily oxidated and had forced the keys to literally explode.
So I removed the leads, had to rebuild many keys and to repair all the others by inserting wood gussets and gluing them together, pressing the wood fibers with clamps to have back a correct key shape.
The hammers were grooved but had never been reshaped before, so they could get back an acceptable shape and functionality, and the action was in very good conditions and just needed a good registration.
It took some time to restore the cabinet but now the worn and scratched surface has been substituted by a high gloss black paint, the new pedal lyre is at its place and also the new music desk is ready.
I was amazed about the construction quality of the piano and proud of the general result of the restoration, but the sound quality had not satisfied my expectations.
The sound is quite brilliant, as one can expect from the bridge agraffes, and the sustain is very good, but the low tenors and the last five bichords in the basses sound really horrible.
This leaded me to the decision of restringing the piano.
I bought the Travis book, so I have the original scales, but I read in many previous posts that this piano model has some of the worst scales in the story of piano making, so I don't think it would be a good idea to restring it repeating old mistakes.
I read that an important improvement would be to add four or five wound bichords in the low tenor section, and change most of the strings gauges, in order to have a more even tension.
I also read about pianos like this restringed with hybrid scales using Paulello wires with different breaking point characteristics, obtaining very good results.
I planned to buy a scales calculating software and I will, but I think that I am still too inexperienced on scales parameters to have immediately safe results from it.
I wouldn't like to restring the piano with poorly calculated scales, so I think that for this first time it is better to ask help from someone with more experience.
I think that this is not a new problem for any of the members of this community and that this model of piano has already been restringed successfully many times.
May someone help me?
I thank you all in advance for any suggestions, that will be greatly welcomed.
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Fabrizio Loi
33100 Udine
Italy
+39338 4444485
fabrloi@yahoo.it------------------------------