Repairing a square piano

I thought people might be interested to see some pictures of an 1820s square piano I did some partial restoration work on recently. This involved removing the action, where a number of hammers had fallen off - on these instruments, they are attached with leather straps glued to the hammer rail, so the problem was due to the decay of the original leather.

Here's a picture of the action after being removed from the piano, the keys taken out and the cover of the hammer rail removed, which also involved getting out several 200-year-old rusted in screws. As you can see, several of the hammers have already come off by themselves. The objective was to replace the hammer straps with new leather of a type as close as possible to the originals.

Here you can see a close-up of the bass hammers - several have already come off, and you can also see the ends of the original leather straps, with copperplate handwriting on all of them indicating the number. On squares of this age, every hammer is made to an individual length, so it's very important to ensure that they go back into the piano in the same order as they came out; they need to be glued and positioned carefully to ensure that they're properly aligned to the strings and not fouling each other.

There was also some additional work on the square, including a new pedal rod to get the sustain pedal working again, and new screws for the lid. As the stringing was original, the piano has been tuned well below standard pitch. Here's a video of the piano being played (with all hammers now working!)