kanadajin I wonder if it has a player mechanism inside - there seems to be an electrical power cord dandling underneath, but it does not appear to be plugged in at the time of the photo.
Good eye! Found another picture and you're right, looks like it has a player system installed:
Well, turns out I'll be at O'Hare tomorrow and next week. Will try to scout it out and report back.
kanadajin Yes, it definitely has a player system installed, although the 2 times I’ve walked by, it was unplugged.
Also, they change the advertising wraps with some regularity. I wonder if they wrap it on site, because I would imagine it would not be cost-effective to pay for moving the piano each time it got re-wrapped.
I was at O'Hare earlier this week, but didn't see the piano (we were in Terminal 1, B Gates). Unfortunately, with the family there trying to get back and forth with luggage, there wasn't an opportunity to go scavenger hunting 
I was in Indianapolis the other day, and stopped by a department store (Von Maur?) and there was a piano with a pianist playing in the center of the store. He was playing cocktail style, very nice! And although the piano wasn’t very big, the music expanded throughout the store quite nicely.
I didn’t want to leave!
Resurrecting an old thread for this very interesting YT video that just popped up:
Gombessa I’m also wondering if the glue gunk was really related to spilled alcoholic beverages. Every time I’ve been by, the piano has a different wrap, and I’m wondering if all the glue may instead be from the multiple wrapping procedures. Also those hammer grooves were pretty crazy! I wonder if someone’s actually been playing it or if they had the player system on a lot.
Sgisela I was wondering the same!
I think most common vinyl wraps are dry-applied. it's a film with a sticky backing that you peel and stick, and you don't need to "paint" on any glue. But there are a lot of exceptions, and some films use water and other liquids for a wet application (hopefully not on a piano!). That gummy goop all over the keys though, I have no idea what that is, or what kind of drinks would be that viscous after the alcohol and water evaporate. Is there a drink that's 2 cups of pure sugar mixed with a shot of Bacardi?
I remember there was discussion here about what kind of player system was installed, and I was glad to see in the video a closeup of the control module, showing it's a QRS. But the piano tech in the video doesn't seem to do much work with player/silent systems, and didn't talk about it at all. But you can see the plungers from the key solenoids sticking up from the back of the keybed cavity.
I think you're right that the piano must have a TON of player hours on it, at an airport I suspect they just had it self-play all day, every day until it stopped working!
The piano tuner in the video seems like a great guy. I've been watching his videos and he's a young guy trying really hard to build a new business around something he loves, and he share what he's learning, including how much he makes in typical day, etc. Really wishing him the best.
OMG!! That poor piano! Good call re the “glue” not being just from beverages… what an odd substance.
I don’t think I’ll be flying through O’Hare until March..l hope I can see it again, and hopefully it will still be ok!
One of my former piano tuners, the gentleman I worked with before moving here, was in charge of he prep when a “new” public piano was installed in the airport near where I used to live. That piano was not near any restaurants or bars. Hopefully it won’t take that same level of abuse!
Back to the O’Hare piano, I wonder if he got any special permission to work on it. A lot of times, keyboard covers have a lock, so at minimum, someone would have had to unlock it for him. But also, I wonder if you just started randomly tuning a public piano, if they would actually let you do that….
Anyway, thank you @Gombessa for posting this video!
Btw what kind of piano do you think that is? I don’t remember seeing a logo on th epilate, and there’s no shot of the fallboard (if memory serves).
candela I’m quite skeptical the piano is that old. The finish is in rough shape, but it looks like a modern polished ebony finish, and my recollection of the logo on the fall board is that it was a newer font than that used on 1890s kimballs. It’s possible le that someone did a complete refinishing of the piano at some point, but I’m skeptical that someone would spend the time/effort to do any kind of restoration work on an old Kimball. I’m not trying to put shade on the brand, but they were never high end of the market pianos.
+1. A Kimball K1 is 5'1" according to old Piano Blue Book links. And this one has a more modern logo, used around the 1990s.
I did some googling and didn't find any Kimballs with the triangular/trapezoidal "sound holes" in the plate, which makes me wonder if this is actually a real, US-made Kimball from when they were still producing pianos up until 1996. Perhaps it's one of the dozens of brands where the name was sold to an Asian piano maker and re-imported in the 2000s?
Gombessa I had this same thought, although of all things one might decide to ‘stencil’ on a fall board, I’m not sure how much affection there is for Kimball.
I don’t really want to cast shade on Kimball. They made lots and lots of pianos, and my grandmother, who was a much better pianist than I am, inherited one and it was the piano she played for most of her life. I have very warm memories of her playing the piano. But I know it had all sorts of issues.
So....I got a little bit sucked into the rabbit hole of trying to figure out what this is.
It says Kimball, and it has a Langer action, which Kimball did own in the 90s. But there's a "2006" date visible on the back action:
And the action is labeled "Langer Accelerated Action:"
That appears to be a trademark filed in 2008 and first used in 2007.
The registering company, "Musical Properties, Inc." seems to have registered a number of piano-related trademarks in the 2000s, most of which were abandoned or cancelled. https://trademark.justia.com/784/39/marshall-78439113.html. Interestingly, among the more interesting ones is...Technics??
Technics has been around for over 50 years, and this TM application was in 2008, so it seems like this holding company just...tries to trademark abandoned names? Anyways, looks like a bit of a dead end.
But the distinctive triangular "sound holes" look like a lead, and very familiar:
A bit of searching yielded that Young Chang, and few of its sub-brands Pramberger, and Weber, use a very similar hole design and plate color. It's not exact, but it's darned close:
Not every detail matches, but it's pretty close, and the design details are much closer to the O'Hare piano than any of the Kimball designs I've seen.
So thus far, my guess is that this isn't a actually a Kimball, but rather some other piano rebranded as Kimball, maybe an early-2000s Asian model, likely one cheap enough to not include duplex scaling.
Anyways, that was my evening of uneducated sleuthing
