Our piano is old, more than 100 years old! Well, considering its age, it's working quite well, except for few things:

• One key does not work
• The sustaining pedal is weak, and does not work as well
• The left pedal works only for half set of keys, on the left.

Last weekend, after we have fixed the rocking chair, Thuỵ and I felt so "empowered" with our "fixing ability", and confident that we can tackle this task, we try to restore our piano. It's a Melville Clark, serial number 11826.

On Sunday morning, decided to open the piano to locate those issues. We open the piano in this order:

1. First we remove the hinge pins for the top panel. The pins were missing, on the left 10-penny was used, on the right hinge we found an 1/8" Allen hex key.
   
2. On the left & right, there are latch to hold the front panel (Desk), we unlatched them & remove the panel
3. The piano key cover & top part, we just lift it up & out.
4. The trap door is remove by pushing up on the holding spring, in the middle, and the panel is tilted out & removed

We found out that non-working key is caused by broken butt plate. Thuỵ skillfully removed all the broken parts which fell inside & behind the actions.

As for the sustaining pedal, the reason is that the trap spring is broken in half, and a wrong spring was in its place.