Piano Tuner West Virginia On Piano Weight

As your piano tuner West Virginia and the surrounding areas, I am often asked why a piano is so heavy compared with a table or any other musical instrument. Typically, a piano buyer asks this question as he is gathering friends to move his piano, rather than hiring professionals. Here is a short explanation of why the piano is so heavy and why it is best not to ask your friends to move one.

Pianos have over two hundred strings, each with a tension in the neighborhood of 150 pounds. The reason for the high tension is to have greater volume, so the sound will fill a concert hall. If you multiply 200 strings by 150 pounds, you will get 30,000 pounds of tension on the instrument. Originally, pianos were made entirely out of wood and had a much smaller number of piano strings at much lower tension. As the design of pianos evolved, more strings were added and the tension was increased. It soon became obvious that a wooden structure could not support so much tension. The pianos actually started folding in on themselves. There are examples in museums of early instruments of such pianos going into “wind,”as in “wound up.” “Wind” is pronounced with a long “i”, rhyming with “bind.”

In order to keep pianos straight, piano makers began putting cast iron rods, then plates in pianos to support the high tension. By the late 19th century, most pianos had what were called, “Three-quarter plates”, which ran from the tail of grand pianos and the bottom of vertical pianos up to the pin block, the block of wood that supports the piano tuning pins. By 1900, most pianos had “full cast iron plates” which also covered the pin blocks. All modern day pianos have “full cast-iron plates,” weighing hundreds of pounds. Cast iron is used, because it bends very little under tension.

That brings us to the final bit of advice. It is not worth risking your health and that of your friends, in order to save a few dollars moving your piano. Additionally, every piano tuner has seen pianos that require hundreds of dollars of piano repairs after amateur movers damaged a piano. It is simply not worth the risk.

If you have other questions about pianos, please let us know. We are your piano tuning West Virginia expert. We also provide professional piano services in all of the areas surrounding West Virginia.