Fall in love with your piano all over again
Piano restoration is an artform, with up to 400 hours of meticulous and highly skilled work going into each restoration project.
The Caradine team is renowned for their painstaking attention to detail. We have the knowledge and experience to get the best sound, tone, and playability from any given piano.
Grand piano restoration
A grand piano consists of over 10,000 moving parts, all of which are subject to wear and tear over time. Piano restoration is a precise and methodical process, addressing each key area in turn to recapture its beauty and brilliance.
The finest materials
Careful material selection is paramount when dealing with cherished instruments. As craftsmen, we use only the same quality materials as the original instrument, often having to search around the world.
Piano frames are large, heavy cast iron structures, engineered to withstand considerable string tension, which equates to around 20 tonnes. These will be removed, prepared, re-finished and carefully adjusted.
Old, tired strings produce a dull sound, for which replacement is the only remedy. We replace with premium steel wire, hand wound bass strings, using fine quality wrest pins with neat, tight coils to ensure a rich tone, long life, and tuning stability.
The soundboard amplifies and radiates the sound and is key to the instrument’s personality. Complex and delicate, they are known to dry out and crack in warm, dry living environments (such as the modern home) causing poor sound, and tuning instability. Each is carefully inspected. If the soundboard has sustained extensive damage, we will replace completely or if possible repair the original soundboard.
Situated beneath the cast iron frame, the wrest plank has to hold the string tension equating to about 20kg per string. Like the soundboard, they are known to dry out and split (making tuning all but impossible) and are typically replaced in older pianos as part of the restoration process. Originally solid beech, modern wrest planks are made from laminated beech or maple, which is more stable and better suited to modern living conditions.
Integral to tone, feel and playability, the “action” of a piano comprises around 5,000 parts. While total replacement is not always necessary, it takes consummate skill to restore and align this delicate mechanism, using only the finest quality materials and painstaking patience.
A clear sign a piano needs regulating is the inability to play softly. Regulation is where we set up the action and keyboard to work perfectly, with all parts accurately aligned, keys balanced, and hammers precisely adjusted to produce a smooth and responsive action for all playing styles.
Voicing is a delicate process, requiring patience and skill – this is where our experience, expertise and knowledge of sound, pitch, and timbre comes to the fore. Every hammer is carefully shaped and adjusted to ensure an even and consistent tone.
Wherever possible, final voicing is carried out at the location where the piano is played, so it can be tailored to the acoustics of the room.
A piano is more than a musical instrument, it is a fine piece of furniture. Our specialist in-house finishing team uses only the finest materials and modern techniques to restore the casework to as-new condition.
All work is hand finished with obsessive attention to detail. We offer a range of modern finishes that accentuate the natural beauty of the wood, through to high gloss black or white, vibrant solid colours and more…
Your beloved instrument is safe with us. Piano moving is a skilled operation, requiring specialist knowledge and equipment. All moves are carried out by either our own team, or by experienced piano removers.