A Gutted Gotha Steck on eBay
Spotted this fine quality instrument on eBay yesterday and made enquiries about it. Seems that the player has been removed relatively recently. Why, oh why do people do this? A real shame! http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=220213108344 Most probably it's down to a piano tuner who finds it easier to tune with the player mechanism out, so removed it permanently. However, I used to be a tuner myself many years ago and was always happy to leave the player in situ whilst tuning. Much easier to work around it than actually remove it, in my view. In the case of larger instruments, it invariably meant standing up to reach the tuning pins properly, but this didn't bother me at all.