The first Pianodrome Charlotte volunteer day

31 January 2023

Today 9 volunteers turned up to get stuck in to taking apart pianos - it was an amazing experience to share what we know so well from back home, and to find such enthusiastic and like-minded people so far away. The group was really diverse and really reminded me of the kinds of turnout we get in Edinburgh when we run these kinds of events. There were of course differences. Around half of the people who were there work in the city - and that means essentially working in banking or insurance. Shawn brought a huge box of Dunkin' Donuts along.

It’s Krispy Kreme’s! Photo credit: Matt Wright

And we discovered an amazing sawdust pattern which came out the back of one of the pianos which had been dismantled. The patter shadows the ribs of the soundboard - all the sawdust which had accumulated in the back of the soundboard dropped out on the floor when the piano was turned around, forming this amazing hashed pattern. But the really cool thing we noticed was that there were a few large empty circles in the pattern. These corresponded to much smaller holes in the soundboard. I realised that these must have occurred when Dray was working on removing the bridges - these need to be tapped out with a combination of paint stripping spades and wooden wedges. This continued banging will have been vibrating the soundboard, causing a pressure change inside the cavity underneath and, like the hole in a subwoofer, pushing air in and out of the hole as it resonated. The air coming in towards the floor will have blown little puffs of sawdust away forming these large clean patches!

Photo credit: Matt Wright