Adventures in Digital Piano Surgery

Katherine is a talented, beautiful, smart, funny, mostly obedient and all around awesome kid. But there are days, like today that she suffers from what Bill Cosby refers to as childhood brain damage. Today my otherwise amazing daughter decided that forcing a straw into the belly of my digital piano would be a good idea. Somehow the straw lodged itself in there in such a way that I couldn't open the piano anymore.

We're not really in a financial situation to pay someone from Yamaha to come dig out a straw and charge me some hundreds of dollars to do it nor are we in a position to just wait it out until we can afford it. I am the pianist (heaven only knows why I agreed to this since I can barely play) in my ward's Relief Society and I practice several hours a week to be able to fumble my way through the songs.

So, out of desperation or stupidity I embarked on my first adventure in digital piano surgery. I started out by giving Katherine a ridiculously long time out and threatened to take her Barbie away if I ever caught her feeding the piano sticky notes or straws or toys again. Then I did an online search to see if anyone else had a child like mine and managed to figure out a way to get the piano apart. No real luck there. I found a couple of blogs (courtesy of my super-helpful sister who heard the whole straw-in-the-piano-mom-freak-out over the phone) but they were all written by men who had nothing better to do with their time than to dismantle their digital pianos for fun. They contained no real information other than a few photos of the mess created by taking their pianos apart. Once guy even sustained some injuries because he tried to pry some of the parts apart, which the piano didn't like and retaliated.

Next, I posted a question on Yahoo! Answers which very occasionally gets a real response. Mostly it's bored twelve year olds posting crap. The only response I got from there was someone suggesting I take a hammer to the piano. Thanks! I think I'll try that!

Finally, I decided I would just try and figure it out myself and if I couldn't do it, then I'd suck it up and call Yamaha. Amazingly, I managed to get the straw out and a few other goodies Katherine had stuck in there which I wasn't aware of. I had to more or less dismantle the paino, but I succeeded where others just got scratched up or spent hours dissecting their pianos. Now I feel all feminist and stuff.

Grrr! I'm a tough lady who managed to outsmart a piece of electronic equipment with nothing but my brain and a phillips head screw driver. *flexes muscles and grimaces* I am freakin' awesome! PS: I'm pregnant too, which makes me even more awesome, you know, or stupid...whatever.

So, for anyone on the internet who may do a google search for dismantling your piano without destroying it or wasting time, here is my piano surgery procedure:

I have a Yamaha Clavinova CLP 220

Step 0: Punish whatever child jammed junk onto your piano.

Step 1: Unplug everything! This includes the wires that connect the top of the piano to the bottom ie: the one for the pedal and the one for the wall. You don't want wires tangling everything up.

Step 2: Using a phillips head screw driver, unscrew the main body of the piano (the part that presumably has something stuck in there) from the legs. Put the screws someplace safe so you don't lose them.

Step 3: Get a friend to help you lift the top of the piano off the legs. It's not real heavy but it's pretty unwieldy. Put this part of the piano either on the piano bench or on the floor.

Step 4: Using the same phillips screwdriver, remove the screws from the back of the piano. There should be four or five. Again, store the screws somewhere safe.

Step 5: At this point you should be able to slide the top of the piano off (this being the part that has the music holder thingy). There's a tongue in groove-type thing (that's not really what it is, but I'm not sure what this little dealie is called, so just go with it) on the lid so that it doesn't just lift off. You'll have to slide it forward to get the lid off.

Step 6: Take out whatever foreign object found its way into your piano. I'm pretty sure there are capacitors and stuff inside so be careful what you touch. I wouldn't want you getting shocked.

Step 7: Repeat Steps 1 through 5 in reverse order and you should have a happy piano.