Crowley player
Hello All. If anybody can tell me anything more about this beast, I'd be very grateful. What I know so far: J.H.Crowley is cast into a disc on the piano frame. This disc is removable. I wonder if other manufacturers used the same frame, and this is an example of early badge engineering? It has to be John H. Crowley of Dalian fame, surely? The drive mechanism has English patents for 1908 and 1909, and the trademark of the Yote Manufacturing Co. I've actually managed to get copies of the patent applications. Both refer to improvements in player piano drive mechanisms. Yote were based in Birmingham until at least the thirties, and made all sorts of small metal items. It's a 65/88 note player. The tracker bar flips up or down to select, and spring-loaded flaps blank off the side you don't want. There is a Themodist-type expression mechanism. The tracker pneumatic is mounted behind and above the spool-box. All information gratefully received! Regards. Rob.

Hi there Rob, Many thanks for sharing this, as soon as I saw "Crowley" mentioned at the foot of your email the other night I thought "Dalian"! The Crowley badge is almost certainly a generic piano frame and action chassis. Pre WWI it was more economical (cheap manual labour) to buy parts and make your own for small outfits. Yote made the player system and it's nice because it's a British one with a genuine British designed dual-player spoolbox. Yote I have listed as late as my 1938 Music Trades Directory as being in Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham as "Manufacturers and patentees of player piano components". At an educated guess the 1913 Crowley Dalian referenced in the Ord-Hume book must have been a Crowley-assembled piano fitted with a Dalian player action. This now makes more sense as the Dalian brochure I have refers to the Dalian as being manufactured under "Grimmets patents". Quite possibly then the brochure I have is nothing to do with the 1913 exhibition but is a promotional item sent to piano manufacturers for them to consider adopting the system in their instruments. This might better explain how my example turned up in the US in pristine condition. No known Dalian example exists though I have some rolls and have even seen the original -*test*-('") roll. As per my previous PPG article on the system I am convinced it found it's way to the US where it was fine tuned to become the technically identical Solo Carola years later - a few comments on the Solo Carola's R&D in a 20s Presto Guide hints at this possibility. Ord-Hume infers the Dalian's downfall was its dependance upon "costly apparatus with which to manufacture the special rolls". This is rubbish as the rolls were made by the Perforated Music Company in London who offered a service to the trade to make rolls for any system and scale desired....and they did indeed do just this for many many small brands and non-standard systems. Neither "Dalian" nor Crowley would have had to pay for "costly apparatus" and I don't think it cost the roll company any significant amount of money to adapt existing machinery and existing masters to the task. Of course there is now another possibility - a Dalian action may well turn up inside any brand of piano either here or overseas and it won't necessarily read "Dalian" on the fallboard! I love a mystery! regards Adam

Re: Crowley player
G'day Rob and thanks for showing your excellent pictures of your player , its so nice to see some different types on here now. Daniel.

Hi Adam. Thank you for the information! A generic piano makes a lot of sense. It would also explain why 'Crowley England' appears to be on a separate piece let into the fallboard. The patents I have are in the name of William Joseph Riley, Mere Green, Sutton Coldfield. Yote were still around in 1963, making rather classy stainless steel cutlery. The whole thing is a bit of an oddity. The striking pneumatics have been re-covered relatively recently (i.e. some time in the last twenty years) and all the small tubing has been replaced with what may be neoprene. Plastic, anyway. On the other hand, the bellows and exhausters look original, and the expression regulators are rotten as a pear! What lurks inside the stack is still a mystery. It was actually the first thing I bought on eBay, in 2001, and I collected it from the old Conacher Organ Works in Huddersfield. Regards. Rob.

Hi All. Out of curiosity, I pulled the front of the Crowley expression box. The bottom row of valves is the action cut-off. Main vacuum comes in at the rear, behind them. That odd hole at the left rear feeds the sustain pneumatic. (That's the pipe at the bottom, behind the regulator spring.) Bass and treble regulators are on each end. Regulated vacuum appears in the two top compartments. Manky pipe just visible top left feeds bass, horizontal slot feeds treble. In the middle are the bypass valves, two per side. If you look closely, you can see that on each side one valve opens about twice as far as the other. Yes, I did make sure they were all sucked fully down! So in theory each regulator can have three levels of bypass, providing four levels of vacuum to the stack. I've no idea if that's what it actually does, and if so, how it's controlled, but it is intriguing! Later. Thinking about this a bit more... Perhaps there are two modes of operation: Themodist: bypass valve closed, piano plays normally soft until snakebite briefly opens valve. Piano accents note. Normal: bypass valve open, piano volume depends on how hard you pedal. Keyslip lever closes valve, piano plays soft. There are two keyslip levers, marked BassPP and TreblePP. It may be that having a pair of valves for each mode is the simplest way of doing it. But I dunno! Regards. Rob.