Why that second-hand piano is so cheap

An advert appears: upright piano, good condition, €200. Or not even that — "free, just come and collect it". The right question is not whether it is a bargain. It is why nobody wanted it at the price good pianos sell for.

The answer is almost always one of three things, and none of them shows up in a photograph.

It is not out of tune. It cannot hold tune.

These are different things, and the difference is everything.

A piano that is out of tune gets tuned. A piano that cannot hold tune has loose tuning pins in its pinblock — the block of wood the pins are driven into, which carries the tension of every string. When that block dries out, cracks or simply tires, the pin turns and the string loses tension. The technician tunes it, it sounds fine that afternoon, and a fortnight later it is flat again.

Tuning it more often does not fix this. The options are:

• A patch: gluing the problem pins or moving up a pin size. Cheap, and it buys time rather than an instrument.
• Repinning the whole piano: days of work, running into four figures.
• Replacing pinblock, pins and strings: days or weeks in a workshop and several thousand euros.

On a €200 piano this is absurd, which is exactly why it costs €200. The market has already priced the repair in.

There is one more detail that catches people buying over the phone: an old piano sitting well below pitch cannot be pulled up to A440 in one go, because strings break. We go into that in what owning a piano actually costs.

Woodworm, which does not stay in the piano

A piano contains a lot of soft wood — and soft wood is precisely what woodworm looks for. It gets in the way it gets into any old furniture: the piano stood on an infested floor, or next to a chest of drawers that already had it.

Three things worth knowing:

• What you can see is the small part. If there are holes and fine dust under the piano or on its back, there are larvae where you cannot see. The holes are the exit, not the nest.
• Treating it is not wiping something on. Proper treatment means fumigating the entire instrument at a specialist firm, and replacing the wood already eaten. It is not a weekend job and it is not cheap.
• It spreads. Woodworm does not stay in the piano out of politeness: it moves into whatever wood is nearby.

That last point is why we do not take in an old piano without seeing it first. An infested instrument entering a warehouse full of other instruments stops being a €200 problem and becomes a whole-warehouse problem. For a production with a period set, the reasoning is the same.

Moths, which eat the sound

Less discussed and just as expensive: moths attack the felts — on the hammers and the dampers. A piano shut in a house for years can have whole sections of the keyboard eaten. It plays, but some notes sound dead and others do not damp.

Replacing hammer felt is a piece-by-piece job, and the cost approaches the value of the instrument quickly.

A cracked soundboard

The soundboard is the surface that makes the sound exist at all. It cracks when a piano has spent years in air that is too dry. A crack does not silence a piano — it takes away projection and sustain, slowly, without anything appearing to be broken.

It is the easiest fault to miss and the one that best explains a piano with "no sound" that nobody can account for.

What to check in five minutes, before saying yes

No substitute for a technician, but it eliminates half the cases:

• Underneath and behind. That is where the woodworm holes and the dust are. Take a torch.
• Ask when it was last tuned, and to what pitch. "A few years ago" and "I don't know" are the same answer. A piano deliberately tuned below pitch is a piano that no longer holds pitch.
• Play every key, one at a time. Dead notes, notes that will not damp, sluggish keys.
• Look at the tuning pins. Rust, or signs of having been glued, means there is history.
• Smell it. A piano that has lived in damp smells of it, and the smell arrives before the diagnosis.

And if it really is for a scene

If the piano is going in front of a camera, one question settles everything before the others: does it have to play?

If it does not, an instrument at the end of its life can serve perfectly well as a prop — provided it is clean, of the right period, and brings no insects onto the set.

If it does have to play, or if sound is recording live, then none of this is optional: you need an instrument that will hold pitch across the shooting days, tuned on location, with someone who can touch it up between setups. And at that point the arithmetic of buying stops making sense long before anyone mentions woodworm.