This N.B. woodworker gives pianos a new lease on life — by taking them apart
CBC
Walking into Jim Allison's workshop, you might wonder whether he's a woodworker or a piano repair man.
It turns out he's both — but he doesn't repair pianos so much as reinvent them.
Allison finds old pianos, often listed as free, out of tune, missing keys, and meticulously takes them apart.
He strips out the heavy iron frame, the strings, hammers, keys, and pedals and then extracts the wood inside.
He then transforms that wood into jewelry boxes, miniature furniture, and even new musical instruments like strumsticks, harps and banjos.
So far, he's deconstructed 42 pianos — but this summer marked his last. Allison says the pianos have yielded so much wood that this woodworking project has reached its coda.
Allison became a woodworker in earnest a decade ago after retiring from his job as an automatic transmission specialist. But he didn't consider stripping pianos for their wood until eight years ago.
"My next-door neighbour had [a piano] that she took out of her father's house after he died … and she asked me one day if I wanted it. And I thought, 'well maybe there's some wood in it that I can use.'"
The pianos turned out to be a treasure trove of beautiful, dry, rare wood — everything from "maple and birch and American chestnut, cottonwood or poplar and spruce and fir."
"Most of [the wood] is at least a hundred years old," said Allison. "It's been in a house that's fairly dry, and it was dry before the piano was built and it does not warp or twist or anything, so it was a joy to work with."
Soon, he was finding dozens of old pianos on Facebook Marketplace, listed for free. He would either deconstruct them on the spot, or load them into his truck and take them home to work on.
Allison loves seeing the reaction of people who learn the mahogany in their homemade jewelry box came from a piano that's at least 100 years old.
"They're surprised at where it came from, because for most people wood comes from the local hardware store or the lumber yard, and almost none of mine does."
The pianos Allison takes apart range in age from 100 to 130 years old. Some of those pianos remained in not only the same family but the same place in the home for their entire lives.
