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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Shangas, post: 330615, member: 360&quot;]As a pianist for nearly 30 years, I can attest to what most have said here - the vast, vast, VAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAST majority of upright pianos sell for next to nothing. Unless it&#039;s by a really famous maker, and in fantastic condition - they pass hands for almost nothing at all - A few hundred bucks at most. $1,000 if you&#039;re really lucky.</p><p><br /></p><p>It has to be an antique Bechstein, Lipp &amp; Sohn, or Steinway &amp; Company to be worth big money, and even then you&#039;re running a risk. They didn&#039;t get big by producing small numbers of pianos - Sure, it&#039;s a steinway - but so are MILLIONS OF OTHERS.</p><p><br /></p><p>And the servicing and tuning on an antique piano (or any piano that hasn&#039;t been serviced for a long time) is prohibitive.</p><p><br /></p><p>If you&#039;re a hobbyist pianist like I am, then your piano should be tuned at LEAST every five years - every two years if you&#039;re a professional. If you let it stretch out for longer between tunings - then it takes a lot longer to tune them, and the price sky-rockets. So imagine how much it costs to tune a clapped-out antique which hasn&#039;t been touched for 50 years - You can do the maths.</p><p><br /></p><p>Our piano at home (a yamaha conservatory grand) hasn&#039;t been tuned in the better part of 10 or 12 years. Once we get it out of storage, we HAVE to get it tuned at least twice to make it playable. When we put it away, we already had ringing keys and off-notes...not pleasant.</p><p><br /></p><p>Pianos at my local auction house, or even flea-market - sell for very little. $1,500 perhaps, for a nice grand piano. $500 and under for a nice upright. $100-$200 for anything else. Part of the reason they sell so cheap is BECAUSE it costs so much to MOVE them and then even MORE to tune them up. So people just don&#039;t wanna pay a lot, unless it&#039;s really, really, REALLY worth it.</p><p><br /></p><p>If it&#039;s a famous piano in good condition, with ivory keys, then it might be worth something. But those are getting rare as heck. Don&#039;t remove the ivory and try and sell it - the selling point of an antique piano IS THE IVORY. They&#039;re so rare these days that even pianos with horrible ivory keys are pricey. </p><p><br /></p><p>My old piano teacher had a massive Richard Lipp &amp; Sohn upright in her living room. Was the better part of five feet tall, from about 1900 with original ivory keys. Playing on that thing was a dream... She was a real musicologist - you couldn&#039;t see the wallpaper on her living-room walls for all her diplomas and degrees - so her piano was kept in perfect condition.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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