Hello,
After contacting the seller via e-mail late in October, and waiting a long time for a response, I finally called him about a week ago, asking for that warranty and the first tuning. He came today, and I started a conversation where I explained the things that I had come across, the independent assessments from the Steinway tech. and the various builders on the internet forums. At first, he was quite offish, but I always returned to one point: he had sold me the piano with the understanding that it was "essentially intact" and "good for many more years" - and the condition of the bass bridge is in blatant violation of such an understanding.
He has now agreed to collect the piano and do some repairs, free of charge. As both he and I will be travelling during December and January, this will only happen during February.
The repairs will consist of
1) Bass bridge: de-string, rout off old bridge cap, make and fit new bridge cap, re-string. He says the dead note is definitely a string, not the bridge. We'll see.
2) Action: replacing damaged dampers and springs, aligning hammers, fixing sticky centers (not re-centering, but presumably lubricating), regulating.
3) Possibly soundboard: rather than filling the crack with epoxy, as the Steinway-tech suggested, he would go the "traditional" route. Here I'm only familiar with the German term: "spanen", i.e. to widen the crack into a groove and glue a shim or wedge into the cut, then cut the glued piece off on a level with the surrounding soundboard. I'm not sure whether he'll actually do this - he seemed to think the crack is not critical.
He also said that I should visit his workshop, as he has recently got some instruments in, amongst others a Rönisch from the same time. If I like one of them, he'd be happy to take back the Seiler in exchange. If not, he'd do the repairs.
So I'll visit him on Saturday to look at those pianos.
Seeing that he offered to make good the defects, I felt that it's only reasonable to give him a chance to do so. Hence, I didn't insist on his reversing the sale.
I'm thinking, however, to make a list of the repairs that we discussed today, putting it on paper, and signing it off together with him, so that we have this as a recorded agreement. Also, I'm considering to have the repairs inspected by an independent tech. before I take the Seiler back. I would hope that this keeps his repair work on the straight and narrow.
So, that's the current state of affairs in a nutshell - feel free to comment or advise if you wish.
Regards,
Mark
