8-17-09 Finally the move from the old shop and from storage is complete.  The new building is full of pianos and parts.  We hope to get the parts from many players cataloged and arranged in an orderly manner so we can find what you need when you need it.  We probably have the largest collection of spare player piano parts found on the continent.  Plus we still have over 100 unrestored player pianos waiting for you to do it yourself or have us restore for you.  Finally we can get back to finishing work on the projects started before the move.  Finishing one up this week.

6-29-09  There is a new chat group up now for your information and enjoyment.  It is on Yahoo Groups and costs you nothing to join.  It is the Mechanical Music Group for Free Discussion.  It was determined that a group was needed for all us hardcore automatic music fans where we could talk about whatever we wanted to address.  The previous group(MMD)  is long lived but has many of the most important members it has alientated.  Their posts are so highly edited or so often removed that most of us simply do not post.  Many folks have also been banned by moderator in that group so discussion there is very narrow and sparse.  Please join our new group at this link:

Mechanical Music Group for Free Discussion

6-16-09   We are finally free of the landlord hassle.  We are free of leaky roofs.  We purchased a building for our shop and storage.  We are still setting up for most efficiency and are hoping to have the shop up and running at full speed soon.  The finishing shop remains to be set up and the woodshop is only half usable.

That means we can finally finish all the projects that had to go on hold when we started moving months ago.

We apologize for the inconvenience of not getting your instrument back to you in a timely manner, but staying in a building with a leaky roof and a deceptive and flaky landlord was no longer an option.  Hurricaine Ike's rain came through and the roof leaked on two of our showroom pianos worth about $7,000 making them worth negative dollars afterward.  This being a place under which the owner claimed to have repaired the roof.

At the moment we are not taking new projects but we hope to finish up several things so we can take new ones once again.

The sale of reed organs from the Paul Carton Estate did really well.  The most expensive organs sold except for the Mason Hamlin List 1 manual.  However, the smaller organs are still available and the prices are right. 

Hannibal Missouri
06-15-08

  Last Friday we got an emergency call from the curator of the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal Missouri.  It seems in the next few days they are expecting the Mississippi  River in their back yard to rise another twenty feet and come to within a foot of the top of the levee.  Several years ago we moved Mark Twain's AEolian Orchestrelle from the Samuel Clemens boyhood home museum to the new museum building.  This new building is a lovely new museum for the Twain collections but memories of 1993 made them nervous about the priceless organ in the lower museum space. 

This is the special order 1903 AEolian Orchestrelle that Mark Twain purchased for his New York Apartment a few years before his death.  In 1993 that building's ground level had been under 9 feet of water.  The decision was made to call us to move the AEolian Orchestrelle player reed organ upstairs to the room where the priceless collection of Norman Rockwell paintings, lithographs, and sketches are displayed.  After two days of work the wonderful Orchestrelle was in its new home well out of the way of floodwaters. 

We will be putting up some pictures and videos of this move very soon.