This idea started when a friend of mine (Harrie van Grinsven) called me and told me he wanted to sell his piano. I once tuned this piano and the cool thing about it, is it’s size. The instrument has one octave less then usual! This is not very common in the world of acoustic piano’s.

This sparked my idea of building a movable piano. So after thinking what to do I decided to buy a big cart (bolderkar in dutch). This is what it looked like:

Once I mounted it on the cart, using only wood, I started playing on the street for fun and taking it to gigs in Tilburg!

But after a while I wanted to improve it. It looked too much like the original cart. I also wanted to lower the center of gravity by lowering it. Extending the wheelbase seemed a good idea for long distance walking to make it more stable.

To make these idea’s possible I needed new gear and learn some new skills 🙂 . So I bought a welding machine, an angle grinder and other stuff that was needed. (gas bottle, safety equipment etc.)

After some grinding I ended up with this frame in which the piano fitted perfectly!

Now I had to put my welding skills to the test and weld it together!

Its not perfect but it holds up just fine!

When the external frame was done, I had to think of how to lower the thing. So I cut the black plastic ring to make the front end lower. To lower the rear I had to chop of the entire axle, shorten it and weld it back together.

Now it was time to weld the frame to the bottom structure. After that I did some sanding and painted everything nice and black (finally no more ugly green paint :))

And finally the finished cart with the piano on top! I also had to remove the original wheels from the bottom of the piano. But these didn’t really function anyway.. I went for a test drive and ended up near the channel. It drives and looks a lot better I think!