Recycling a Free Piano: Giving the Gift of Music!

Dave describes the process of obtaining a cheap piano and re-purposing its use for a beginning piano player. A Baldwin piano, obtained with a winning $5 bid from a local school, was given a new life and purpose with some fresh stain, minor repairs and an easy move to its new home for an appreciative family. 

View all Mighty Line Safety Talk Blogs and Podcasts
Learn more about Mighty Line floor tape and Mighty Line Floor Signs
Request free floor tape samples * No Risk and Free To Try
All Mighty Line Minute Floor Tape Blogs

Transcript

Recycling a Free Piano: The Gift of Music!

Making music important and recycling a piano! Here's how I did it.

How to Move a Piano! First of all, you gotta find one! This one is a beauty. Five bucks. Five bucks at auction. Holly Lane School. Yeah, there it is. But you gotta make sure that when you get these things, you get the piano service record, okay? Then the second thing you need? A helper! There he is. we're gonna muscle this thing out of here. Piece of cake.

Inside guts are all there. Here it is folks, step-by-step. Just taking this thing apart, and before you know it. 

And then you gotta putty things up with Minwax wood filler, touch-ups that you have to do. And you sand, ready to go! Cool!

There it is. Starting to go with the black. Folks, we're coming along. Repairs to make here but overall, I think it's still a doable project. I think it's got a beautiful sound to it. We gotta go deep. Yeah, we gotta get down here. Oh boy. 

Folks, you want to do two coats of stain. I haven't wiped it out yet, but it's looking pretty good. I love this Quick Coat, dries in two hours, awesome.

Okay, when you get to this point, time to get a little help from your friends, family. Pick up a brush and stain and make it all work out! How are you doing there, Jon? Doing good. It's coming along. It sure is. Looks great! Thanks for your help! 

Coat one. Built in '61, it's a veneered version of the Baldwin, so it's a Hamilton. We do have some solid oak on the sides, but there's a lot of veneer. And that tends to chip, so you'll see what happens here when you try to stain. I've had to patch, and then you get these little blotches where the patches were. I don't worry about that when you're dealing with a piano that cost you five bucks. And why spend too much time on it? Let's just get this thing done! More coming.

We take this Minwax Grain Highlighting. I've got white silver paste here. And look what happens to the grain. Isn't that beautiful? Yep. Just go in little circles against the grain, pressing hard. 

This one, which is the keyboard cover, held up pretty nicely, so I'm pretty happy with that. My whole purpose was not to get perfection, but to deliver something that would ultimately give people an appreciation for an instrument that could bring value to them for the rest of their lives. 

And the other thing is I didn't want someone to be disincented from playing piano because it was an ugly old school piano.

We're going to apply more stain. After two coats just lightly rub it off with a rag. Make sure you got your rubber gloves on. Okay, it's time. It's time to use our Minwax Grain Highlighting Finishing Wax. I'll show you what this starts looking like. 

Here we've got the keys. I went and cleaned them, the white ones. They're not real ivories, and I just cleaned the top. I'll go back and do the blacks later, and put these back in. Not too much of a problem as long as you're careful and gently placing them into the keybed. I got everything all together here. Got all the keys back in. Looking good. Look at this. I got problems. Yes, I do. 

I saw the problems when I had the action out. And I've got some straps here that aren't connected. But my fear is that if I try to mess with it, I could make it worse. So, I'll get a tuner that knows how to do these things. But my goal was to get the finish on this thing done and get this put together within a few days and off to the customer, a good friend of mine. 

Screwed up a little bit where I sanded after I had stained to deal with what I perceived to be a problem which was minor. Should've ignored it. Circle in the middle of the board. It looks beautiful otherwise; I'm going with it. 

Okay folks, we gotta get these little sticks here back in. Okay, we're using a little stripper here, Citrus Strip. Dabbing this thing on. Gonna scrape it, off sand it down and coat it. 

This is a product that came all the way from England. Approved by Her Majesty the Queen. Never heard of this before. Renaissance. But in any event, this is a micro crystalline wax polish used on a lot of things, and I'm going to use it on this little keyboard cover here. And just to see how it turns out, I'm going to rub this stuff in to dry to a harder finish than the wax paste that I've been using from Minwax.

So let's see if it really does the job. Alright, let's see what this stuff looks like. Ooh, waxy! Looks like something that the Queen would make her candles out of. Let's give it a shot and rub this stuff in. Not cheap. Here we go. I'm just gonna get right at it. Ooh, it's got a nice feel to it. Wow, slick. Okay, I gotta put down the phone and get into this.

There it is after using the Queen's Wax! I don't know if it makes it look better. I felt like it did, but what I was after was in places where there'd be a lot of handling and touching with fingers, maybe a little less opportunity for finger smudges. I've got some work to do next time around with getting all of this right, and maybe in the proper lighting. 

I'm gonna go ahead and put this on the top board as well just because it's likely that someone might touch it, and plus I've got enough here that I can do that. I'm not sure I'm going to put it everywhere because it's expensive, but we'll see where I get.

Okay, folks, we're getting there. It's still under incandescent light at night, but you can see I put on the Queen's wax and created a couple little blemishes here and there because I rubbed out my work from before. The good news is that the wax is harder than the wax from the stain treatment, and as far as I'm concerned, what's more important is the functionality of this thing. Yep, getting there.

Morning, folks. It's day five, 8 a.m. We're ready to move this piano. It's the end of the road for it. Got my helper. First one anyhow. It helps. All right folks, we got the thing in the truck here, it's just above freezing. Still moving pianos! Alright, we got some moving to do, so let's figure this out.

And there she is! Delivered, a little more work to do to put some parts and pieces together, but, uh, yeah! Done! And that's it! Look at that beauty! Wow! I'll tell you what, you won't find a piano like that for five bucks anywhere. 

That's kind of the end of the story folks. Was it worth it? Uh, yeah. When you play it, it's worth it. I can't play it right now because there's kids upstairs sleeping. Enjoy!