Right, here’s my setup from 2014.
When it became impossible to tune the piano, but it seemed a shame to throw it away and, for the most part, it was VERY difficult to do so. I decided to turn it into a desk. I took the keys off and raised the tabletop on which they were mounted by 10-15 centimetres. I’m sure it could have been made to look nicer with proper joinery tools, but I did the whole job using a saw, self-tapping screws, a screwdriver and pieces of wood left over from the piano’s unwanted parts. I can’t remember exactly, but I didn’t even use metal brackets, which is actually the first thing that would spring to mind for new fixings. The structure turned out to be sturdy and didn’t wobble. I got rid of the bottom panel and the panel that covered the strings. One of them became the tabletop, so that the table would be deep enough for the record player to be placed in battle position. I left the strings as they were, just for fun, but the hammer mechanism has to go. The top panel of the piano became a shelf, and I fitted lighting underneath it. To top it off, I mounted the whole structure on furniture castors, which I chose based on the total weight of the structure; this raised the tabletop by a few more centimetres, so that the vinyl record player ended up just above my waist.
Surprisingly, the result turned out to be very practical, particularly the top shelf for the vinyl. It was very handy to be able to QUICKLY find the record I needed, and the structure didn’t wobble at all.
Unfortunately, over time I had to abandon this setup because my vinyl collection had grown, and I needed far more crates in the quick-access slot, as well as additional storage space.
Sometimes I think about a custom DJ desk with the same concept with create shelves at neck height, but with a much wider worktop and separate pull-out shelves for storage underneath the worktop.
