Today I spent some time replacing a few of the worn out tapes in our upright piano with clip on bridle straps (I found a relatively inexpensive full set of tapes here) after getting fed up with hitting ‘dead’ notes when trying to play.

Replacing the clip-on tapes was fairly simple and went something like this:

1. Remove the old, worn-out tape.
2. Clip the new tape on to the post just above the point where the previous tape was attached.
3. Fiddly bit: twist the clip around so that the tape is coming from underneath the post and push it right to the back (the part furthest from you).
4. Making sure that the tape isn’t twisted, bring it down to the right of the bridle wire and attach (use other straps in the piano as an example).

This diagram (found here) might help and shows the working parts of an upright piano mechanism. The part that needs replacing is part 20 (the bridle strap), which attaches to parts 18 (bridle wire) and the post between parts 24 and 25 (the back stop and hammer butt).

While the cover was off, I thought it would be nice to share a few pictures. When you see how much time, effort and skill it would take to create these instruments it makes you appreciate them even more.