Heirloom Pianos

Custom-Made Velvet Grand Piano Covers — $175 Delivered

We’ve recently brought in our first of a new range of custom-made velvet grand piano covers, and we’re now making these available to our customers Australia-wide.

Each cover is made to order to suit the dimensions of your individual piano, rather than being a generic one-size-fits-all cover. They’re available in black, dark blue, dark purple, dark green and red, with the option of having your piano’s brand embroidered on the front, as pictured on this Kawai.

$175 including GST and delivery to your door for grand pianos up to 200 cm in length. Larger instruments can also be accommodated, although a small additional charge may apply.

As these are individually made to order, please allow approximately 6–8 weeks for manufacture and delivery.

If you’d like one, simply send us a message with the make/model of your piano and its dimensions, and we can take it from there.

Another piano delivered — this time to Warialda! 🎹

One of the things I love about this job is taking quality pianos well beyond the major cities and getting them into homes right across regional Australia.

If you find the right piano, distance doesn’t have to be the problem. We can arrange delivery throughout regional NSW and much further afield.

Warialda today. Where next — Coober Pedy? 😄

If you’re looking for a piano, wherever you happen to be, get in touch.

🎹 Two pianos, two new homes!

A fantastic day on the road today delivering and setting up two beautiful instruments for their new owners.

First stop was Gunnedah, with a brand-new Kawai K-300 — delivered, set up and tuned, and now ready for many years of music in its new home.

Then on to Tamworth with a superb pre-owned Yamaha U2, another wonderful instrument going to a very happy new owner.

At Heirloom Pianos, we supply quality new and pre-owned acoustic pianos, with professional advice, delivery, setup and ongoing technical support.

If you’re considering a piano for your home, school, studio or venue, send us a message — we’d love to help you find the right instrument. 🎶

New & pre-owned pianos | Sales | Delivery | Tuning & servicing

Extraordinary news, everyone — I’m home for the weekend! 🎹

If anyone is in the market for a new or second-hand acoustic piano, feel free to drop me a line.

There’s currently a fantastic selection of pianos available at the showroom just outside Armidale, and I’m taking appointments for the rest of today and Sunday if needed.

Feel free to send me a message here or contact me on 0414 549 079.

Many thanks,
Ben
Heirloom Pianos

Missing an obscure but oh-so-critical piece of your piano? Keep reading… 🎹

I’ve been having a bit of fun lately sourcing some rather unusual and difficult-to-find piano parts for customers around Australia.

Through a slightly unusual combination of industry know-how, contacts with suppliers and manufacturers, and relationships with piano factories overseas, I can often track down parts that are otherwise remarkably difficult to find.

This week, for example, a customer in Queensland contacted me looking for a replacement music desk hinge for an older piano. The original part was no longer available, but I managed to source a modern alternative that should retrofit with a little DIY work.

And I’ve been doing enough of this lately that I thought I might turn the side hustle into a slightly more serious sideline.

So: are you missing an oh-so-critical piece of your piano?

A hinge? A pedal? A caster? A music desk? A replacement grand piano leg? Some bizarre little piece of hardware that disappeared twenty years ago and apparently nobody makes anymore?

Send me some clear photos, measurements, and the make and model of your piano, and I’ll see what I can find.

[email protected]

Or just message me through the socials.

No part too obscure. No challenge too ridiculous. 🎹

A busy few weeks tuning in preparation for HSC exams.

Good luck to all students (and teachers!)

🎹 For Sale — 2004 Kemble CLA-T | $3,895 including delivery

Every now and again, you come across a piano with a particularly interesting — and slightly mysterious — provenance. In this case, it results in something of the best of both worlds.

This Kemble CLA-T, manufactured in England in 2004, comes from a fascinating period in British piano manufacturing.

Kemble was a long-established English piano maker which became closely intertwined with Yamaha during the 1980s. From 1985, the Kemble factory began manufacturing Yamaha pianos for the European market, and Yamaha subsequently acquired a majority interest in the company.

The result was an unusual marriage of Japanese Yamaha engineering and British piano manufacture.

The CLA-T is very much a product of that relationship. Beneath the Kemble name is an instrument heavily based around Yamaha design and engineering, but with Kemble giving the piano its own character through differences in materials, voicing and presentation.

In other words, you get much of the dependability, action design and engineering for which Yamaha uprights are renowned, but with a somewhat more European tonal character.

This particular piano isn’t cosmetically perfect — there are a handful of minor blemishes — but musically it is in excellent condition. It has a responsive action, an excellent tone and, having been built in 2004, has decades of useful musical life ahead of it.

It isn’t an “heirloom” piano in the sense of a handmade European instrument costing tens of thousands of dollars. What it is, however, is a very well-built professional-quality upright that should comfortably serve a student, teacher or family for many years to come.

$3,895 including delivery to Sydney, Canberra, Armidale or Tamworth.

🎹 Kemble CLA-T
🇬🇧 Made in England
📅 2004
🇯🇵 Built during Kemble’s Yamaha-owned era
🔧 Inspected, serviced and tuned
🚚 Delivery included to Sydney, Canberra, Armidale or Tamworth

Video demonstration available. Please feel free to message me with any questions.

What happens when a piano bass string breaks… and you’re hundreds of kilometres from the next tuner?

Unlike plain piano strings, bass strings are individually made to suit a specific piano’s scale. They’re not something you can simply pull off the shelf.

In regional areas, where another technician might not be passing through for months, there are a couple of practical options:

🎹 Universal bass strings – a prefabricated string that can be cut and hand-finished to suit the piano. They won’t quite match the tone of the original, but they’ll get the instrument playing again.

🎹 String splicing – joining the original broken bass string to a new length of matching wire. Because most of the original string remains, the result is often surprisingly stable and can be an excellent interim (and sometimes long-term) repair.

Sometimes piano work isn’t about finding the perfect solution—it’s about finding the best solution for where the piano happens to live.

Day 3 of the restoration

A short day in the workshop today, but plenty of progress.

Today we’re replacing all of the front and balance rail key punchings. The originals were wool, but these modern synthetic replacements have proven far more resistant to insect damage in our climate, making them the better long-term choice.

One of my favourite discoveries was hidden beneath the old punchings. Instead of paper washers, the factory had used strips of recycled newspaper from the 1920s to regulate key height. Some appears to be in English, while other pieces may be German. Whatever the articles once said is probably lost to history—but it’s a wonderful reminder that “recycling” isn’t nearly as modern an idea as we like to think.

We’re also removing the original adjustable back rail, a 19th-century design that controlled key dip. By the 1930s this system had largely disappeared, so we’ll be regulating the action using modern methods instead.

Tune in tomorrow—there’s plenty more piano archaeology to come.

Day 2 – The Restoration Continues

More disassembly today, with plenty still to come.

Today’s major milestone was the first serious strip-down of the piano. The original bass strings have now been removed and will be sent overseas to be accurately copied and reproduced as a brand-new set. We also removed the entire pedal assembly, and as you can see from the photos, the pedals have seen well over a century of faithful service.

I do want to make something very clear about this restoration.

This is not intended to be a museum-grade, historically accurate restoration. If you’re a purist hoping to see the instrument returned to exactly how it left the factory over 100 years ago, you may want to look away now!

Instead, our goal is to create an instrument that will be played and enjoyed every day by a modern pianist. That means making a number of carefully considered changes to improve the piano’s tone, touch and reliability, while still respecting its history and character.

Some of those changes include:

• Replacing the original wound strings at the tenor break with modern copper-wound replacements.
• Replacing the original German silver wound strings with modern equivalents.
• Perhaps most controversially, replacing the entire pedal assembly—including the pedals and pedal rods—with a modern assembly to improve feel, reliability and long-term serviceability.

I’d love to restore every original component, but the reality is that time is money. In many cases, new parts are less expensive—and ultimately produce a better result—than spending many hours repairing heavily worn originals.

So here’s the question:

Is this sympathetic restoration… or piano torture?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.