Restoring a Challen Grand Piano: The Challen Mini Grand

Recently, I've been asked to restore an old Challen, mid 1930's mini grand piano.

This particular job is a little special, as it has a lot of sentimental value as well as huge professional potential to be used on a regular basis by a dance school in London, so I thought it might be a good idea to keep a diary-style blog to record the rebuild process.

First time using blogger, so hoping that future posts might be a little better laid out.

A couple of months ago I was contacted by one of my regular customers, who works for a dance school in London, asking if it would be possible to arrange for me to go and check out an old grand. It had fallen into disrepair in recent times, but if restorable would then be donated to the school by the current owners, who wanted the piano to go to a good home.

Due to a busy schedule and bad traffic on the day of the valuation, I didn't actually manage to get round to see the piano until later in the evening. By this time, the sun had set and the daylight was slowly dwindling away. Any other time, this would not have been an issue, but in this particular case, I had to move quite quickly - the piano was in a room which had had all the furniture removed... including the light fittings!

Challen Grand

My initial glance over the piano was quite promising. The casework had seen better days, and the internal parts were very dusty, but that was mostly superficial. I tested the wrestplank in several areas, and it seemed to be stable. In fact, on playing the piano, it still had a fairly decent tuning in it, for saying that it hadn't been tuned on a regular basis in recent times. The strings were beginning to rust, however, and a few pins around the centre were definitely not as tight as they should be. Already, I was thinking it needed restringing.

Damaged Top

The ivory keys all seemed to be unchipped and reasonably coloured. The action was in need of serious regulating, but otherwise played and gave the impression that the piano would be a decent instrument once restored.

The biggest cause for concern was a single large split, which ran along the length of the soundboard. A split soundboard can cause many problems; a loss of tonal quality, buzzing and rattling being common problems.

The Varnish was faded and crazed

With the light now nearly completely gone, I'd made my decision to suggest a rebuild, and rang the customer to see what they wanted to do, and was delighted when I got the go-ahead to arrange for a rebuild.

The last obstacle was for me to get the piano into a workshop suitable for such a task! I have access to a room in London which is used often for the restoration of pianos, but for a job this extensive, I needed somewhere with all the necessary tools for the work in question.

Enter Mr Phil Taylor, of Phil Taylor Pianos. His climate controlled, fully equipped workshop in Nottingham is custom built for this type of work, and was my first thought once I realised the extent of the task ahead.

Keys

Within a few weeks, the piano was in its new temporary home in Blidworth, Nottinghamshire, where I took the photos I have included in this blog. The next step was to get the piano resprayed, which is the focus of the next blog in the series.