CLEANING AND REPAIR OF A 1972 WURLITZER 200
This 1972 Wurlitzer 200 is the first one in almost excellent condition on the inside, but still needed a thoroughly cleaning.
It appeared that it has never been opened before, not even for repairs. We bought it from its first owner and it had never seen anything but a living room. A lot of coins had entered the inside, the oldest from 1950 (just one year after DM had been established), the youngest from 1982, alongside a lot of dust and some dirt on the outside.
After removing and cleaning the lid a lot of vacuuming and tender cleaning with a brush had to be done especially to the keybed.
The keys were removed, cleaned and polished. No work had to be done on the pedestal felts due to almost no use in the past years. Lubricating, polishing and aligning the keypins was obligatory.
On this restoration we decided to keep the original amp as the 1972s are certainly not as bad as the previous revisions, different to our other 2 Wurlitzers (built in 1971 & 1978) that received incredible new amps by Vintage Vibe that certainly give you more options in a recording situation.
An easy accessible fuse holder and a new DC plug were also added. One of the last restorations left us with an original shielding tube where we could run through the transformer lines, in order to get rid of the hum and not mess with copper foil and shortages. Minimzing the notorious hum was also achieved by adding reed bar shields.
Even though the original amp will never be 100% quiet like the new Vintage Vibe ones, it's nice to have one in almost original condition like it rolled right out of the factory.
Lubricating and adjusting the whole action was long overdue and needed to be done, but luckily no reeds or hammers needed to be replaced again due to almost no wear. Minimal tuning was done just to get a nice sweetened tuning throughout the whole keyboard.
Then off to the fun part that leaves you with a nice scent in the room for weeks: polishing all the chrome parts and getting rid of the most obvious rust. Again we decided to keep some signs of time on it and to just get it some well groomed appearance rather by not over doing the polishing job.
All in all this piano is clearly the cleanest one we've seen so far and offered the best base for restoration imaginable and is now a perfect addition to the family in the studio as so far all three Wurlys sound completely different and offer different vibes.
