Here are some photos of teardown highlights. To reiterate my point from one of the earliest posts: take many photos! Digital storage space should not be an issue (even high quality pics don’t need to be more than a MB each), so get yourself some cloud storage and start clicking!

What’s nice about this player action is that most of the major wooden compartments are screwed and gasketed together. This means that it is generally intuitive and painless to disassemble these components, without worrying about precision saw surgery or steam baths to get things apart. Those are the fun sorts of activities you get into with some advanced projects.

So again, if you just take out every visible screw, and gently pull along the gasket line, most boxes will open to reveal the chambers within. Of course, I don’t want to give the impression it takes 10 minutes to break down the entire action (it doesn’t), but considering the alternative, it’s relatively easy, at least.

I noticed early on that the stack number was stamped on the bass side, on all components. I thought at first “gee, that seems like overkill”. Once I took everything apart and several weeks/months had elapsed, it dawned on me that these numbers were stamped there to ensure proper orientation on reassembly. Duh!

The tracker bar, in situ, seen from above. The nipples are all reinforced with a thick shellac, covered with old cloth strips. Cosmetically it is unsightly, but the shellac does serve the purpose of fortifying the nipples. You can remove it, but you really, REALLY don’t want to damage the nipples in the process.  A combination of solvents and heat (not too hot with the gun setting!) should do the job.

Another shot showing work in progress. The rubber from the tubing had cured on the brass nipples, meaning they were on there really good. Again, a solvent (I used Varsol, some swear by gasoline!), utility knife (to slice along tubing stubs), small needle nose pliers and a wire brush to finish up is what I used in this instance.

Opening up the valve chambers:

Stripping down the pump. The white squares are old gaskets made of blotter paper. It made for relatively easy removal of the various valve boxes.

In this action the governor is not attached directly to pump trunk, but mounted underneath the keybed. For a large person like me, this involves making yourself into a small pretzel to reach the screws for the mounting brackets, in order to extract this peripheral device.

I will show more specific steps in further posts!