GRAND PLANS

LAFAYETTE SQUARE IN HAVERHILL IS NOT THE NICEST PART OF TOWN, AND DUNCAN Street is part of the reason why. On one corner is a vacant diner with a "sale pending" sign that's been there for years, and next to it another vacant building, another "sale pending." Next to that is a bar, which is still open. Looming over the rest of block is a six-story redbrick building, a reminder of the days when Haverhill was a shoemaking center. But on an August day at 6:45 a.m., with the sun beaming down, even this scene feels hopeful. There are workers streaming toward the red-brick building. A man already inside looks out a second-story window and yells a greeting to one of the workers below. They banter in Cantonese, then the man in the window says "Good morning!" in good English, and the man on the ground says "Good morning" in reply, though his English is not so good.

Fifteen minutes later, Bruce Clark parks his Miata on the street outside the building. He waves at some men finishing off YunYan cigarettes before they head in to start their day. Clark, at 60, is trim and has a quick, almost bouncy step. His metal-rimmed glasses are square and large enough to almost pass for safety glasses - a good thing, since he usually doesn't bother with safety glasses, even when he's poking around machine-tooling routers that spit out chunks of wood as if they were watermelon seeds. Clark steps inside the factory, continuing his quest to build the world's best piano.

Clark is a piano engineer at Mason & Hamlin, a revered name among piano cognoscenti. This morning, Clark, who has been at the company for 22 years, is taking his latest step toward creating a new 5-foot-4-inch grand piano, a Model B, in company parlance. He doesn't much like small grand pianos - anything less than 5 feet long he calls a "piano-shaped object," and the Model B comes dangerously close to being a PSO. But Mason & Hamlin made a grand this small in its heyday early in the last century, and it's a good product to offer in markets like New York, where buyers can have plenty of money but not much space. The B will be Mason & Hamlin's fifth grand piano model created under current ownership - the largest is more than 9 feet long - and it also makes an upright.

He visits his office on the sixth floor and prints out some specifications. He's using a computer-aided design program that works with the software in the factory's sophisticated CNC - for computer numerical control - routers. These can be programmed to operate 10 to 12 different drills, cutters, and the like. He stops on the second floor to pick up a new wooden spoil board, a pattern, for the Model B's support struts, then heads downstairs again.

At one of the two routers, Clark is going to drill holes in the spoil board, trim its edges, and cut grooves. He has put a super-hard laminate on this one, to lengthen its working life. "This may ruin the cutter," he says, sliding it into place. But the laminate goes through cleanly, and at 8:35 a.m., the spoil board is ready to head back to the pattern shop. But Clark's not ready to let it go. He has the router shave another five-1,000ths of an inch, finishing a spoil board no one will ever see. "In engineering and patternmaking, you should be setting an example," he says. "We should make sure we have spectacular patterns." Getting the Model B right is how Clark's days will be spent until December, when the company will start producing Model B's in time for the instrument industry's biggest trade show in January, Mason & Hamlin's next step in its comeback.

CLARK IS AN ACCIDENTAL PIANO MAKER, LIKE MOST of the 90 or so people who work at the plant. The son of two pianists, he rebelled and learned guitar. He was a sociology major in college in his native Wyoming, spent time in a graduate journalism program that he hated, then came to Berklee College of Music and stayed in Boston. He became a piano maker because he needed a job and a friend knew of someone building grand pianos. By hand. It can take 800 hours to make a grand that way.

Mason & Hamlin puts an emphasis on hand work in the varnishing and much of the assembly. As to the remainder, a computerized router can cut parts more precisely, rapidly, and consistently than the best craftsman. But even with computer-aided design and manufacturing, Clark says, "we're still in the 19th century here" in terms of the company's reliance on traditional craftsmanship.

Portraits of Henry Mason and Emmons Hamlin hang in the part of the sixth floor where Clark and the other managers have their offices. Against one wall is an old reed organ, the product Mason & Hamlin made when it was founded in Boston in 1854; the company started producing grand pianos in 1881, and for its first 50 years challenged Steinway for preeminence among American piano makers. Mason's father was the most famous hymn composer of his day, with the music for "Nearer My God to Thee" and "Joy to the World" among his credits. The 19th century was a boom time for the company - it produced some of the fi nest home entertainment centers of the day, after all. But US piano sales peaked in the first decades of the 20th century, and Mason & Hamlin had its best year in 1915, when it sold 500 grands.

Eventually, radio, the phonograph, war, and the Depression all took their toll on the piano business, and Mason & Hamlin went through several mergers and ownership changes before mid-century and was for a time relocated to Rochester, New York, as part of now-defunct Aeolian American. The industry revived after World War II, but the 1970s brought music education cuts in public schools; that more girls began to choose sports rather than piano lessons didn't help, either, and neither did double-digit interest rates that hurt the sales of many high-end consumer goods. Then came the personal computer. The IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and since then, sales of school- and family-friendly upright pianos have plummeted, as education dollars have shifted from instruments to technology. Sales of grand pianos, however, have risen over the past two decades.

Even though it has long been known for its grands, Mason & Hamlin changed hands three times between 1985 and 1995, the year before its current owners bought the then-Haverhill-based company, which was in bankruptcy. Each new owner stuck to the unique Mason & Hamlin design: The pianos feature remarkably thick maple rims - the vertical sides of the piano - which makes for a tone many fans argue is the most powerful of any piano ever made. (Every piano has two rims: The inner rim holds the vibrating wooden soundboard, wires, and hammers while the outer rim focuses the sound back onto the soundboard.) These are made by forcing glued-together strips of wood into the curvy-triangle shape of a grand. Over the company's storied history, two things kept bringing Mason & Hamlin back: a consistent market for expensive grand pianos and a name that stood for something great.

KIRK BURGETT, THE COMPANY'S CO-OWNER AND president for operations, remembers the first time he saw a Mason & Hamlin piano. He and his brother ran a Sacramento piano store, selling new instruments and rebuilding old ones, and someone brought in a vintage grand for rehab. "It was the heaviest thing we ever had in the store," he says.

Kirk Burgett is in the sixth-floor conference room. He's wearing sneakers and black jeans with a collared shirt, and his constant companion is a metallic-blue thermos cup, which he occasionally unscrews to sip some coffee. At 49, his hair is thinning but still mostly black. In front of him on the conference table are two brass caster assemblies, one a twin-wheeled style used on Mason & Hamlin's massive concert grands, the other a smaller version that the company may adopt for the rest of its pianos. In the background is the sound of a grand piano being put through its paces - the sixth floor also serves as an informal showroom.

The youngest of four children and the only one who can't play piano, Burgett is a crackerjack technician and rebuilder. He runs the manufacturing for Mason & Hamlin, while out in Sacramento his partner and brother Gary Burgett and their colleague Tom Lagomarsino handle marketing. The three also manage the Burgetts' main business, PianoDisc, a well-regarded maker of electronic player-piano systems used everywhere from Fenway Park to the Boston Steinway dealer, M. Steinert & Sons. The combination has worked - cash from profitable PianoDisc lets them invest in Mason Hamlin's manufacturing, marketing, and product development. And PianoDisc has also benefited, says Kirk Burgett, from its new association with a venerable old name in instruments. Even though 2006 has been a down year for pianos, including grands, according to Brian Majeski, editor of The Music Trades, an industry publication that also tracks piano sales, Mason & Hamlin sales are up slightly more than 12 percent so far this year over last year's $6.4 million gross. Company operations squeaked into the black in late 2001 and have stayed there ever since, Burgett says, though he won't reveal by how much, and that does not account for the initial start-up costs, which took longer to cover.

Getting to this point has taken much longer than the Burgetts thought it would. Kirk Burgett moved his family from Sacramento to Haverhill when they bought the company in 1996. He told his wife it would be an adventure - spend a year in Massachusetts, see some snow. A decade later, and the oldest of his five kids graduated from high school in Amesbury this year.

The Burgetts' planning was off in part because they thought were buying a functioning piano factory. "Due diligence," Burgett says, pressing his lips together. It took more than six months before the place was ready to make a piano - there were no factory employees, the electrical system wasn't up to code, and much of the manufacturing equipment wasn't functioning. The Burgetts rehired Clark and brought back several other key employees, too.

But in their first year as owners, they suffered 110 percent turnover on the factory floor, where employees balked at the hard work of turning chunks of wood into premium pianos when Boston's tech economy was booming. Burgett was wondering what he'd gotten himself into. One day he had lunch at a local Chinese restaurant and noticed that all the workers were Chinese, an oddity in a town like Haverhill, which is only slightly more than 1 percent Asian. His California company had employed many Chinese immigrants with experience in factory production, so Burgett asked the restaurant manager where he found his workers. "We bus them in from Boston" was the answer.

Mason & Hamlin now owns four white Ford vans. Two of them leave Boston's Chinatown every morning at 6 for the 35-minute drive to the factory. One leaves from North Quincy, another departs from Malden. These four buses carry well over half of the company's workforce, and turnover has dropped dramatically. "There are three languages spoken here in the factory - English, Chinese, and piano," Clark says. "Nobody here speaks all three."

That creates its share of problems. But through the intuitive nature of the mechanical mindset, it works out. For instance, Tan Guohong had worked at Mason & Hamlin for all of a week when he walked into the office of plant manager Jamie Marks in mid-October 2001 and plunked down a carefully veneered cheek block, the small piece of wood that holds a keyboard in place at each end. Then he walked out. Tan spoke no English, but he didn't need to. Marks called Bruce Clark over and showed him the block. They both knew Tan had found the answer to one of their most vexing difficulties - the new Mason & Hamlin still had a problem after more than five years in business with varnished wood finishes, since the end grain of a piece of wood stains a different shade than face grain. Covering the cheek block with veneer would make the grain the same on all exposed sides. They couldn't offer pianos in finishes that weren't black until they got this figured out, because although finish is irrelevant to a piano's sound, no one wants to plunk down $50,000 for a piano that doesn't look perfect. (The largest Mason & Hamlin concert grand goes for $94,500.) No one else in the factory knew how to do what Tan had just done; he spent the next year teaching the other workers how to do this sort of fine veneering. Now, in addition to black, the company produces pianos in rosewood, mahogany, and other woods, and Tan runs the pattern shop.

Tan, who is 56, breaks into a grin when he talks about how much he likes creating fine instruments. But he also finds the place somewhat mystifying. The pipe factory where he worked in Guangzhou was completely modern and employed 700 people. Mason & Hamlin is "a very old factory," he says. "When I first walked in, I thought, 'Why does it feel like I'm going back 100 years?' " (Tan still speaks almost no English. I interviewed him through a translator, another Cantonese speaker who works at the plant.)

Modernity is coming. Two near-century-old rim presses still in use in the basement, with their battered curved metal plates and gigantic C-clamps, will likely be gone in five years. Newer models are built on new rim presses, made in Tan's workshop, that improve efficiency and take advantage of modern materials. Once the new Model B is done, Mason & Hamlin will start to replace the old presses. Yet, despite progress, no one at the company thinks the factory in Haverhill - it was built for shoemaking - is ideal for making 1,400-pound pianos. The company is near its goal of producing seven pianos a week, but Burgett says it probably couldn't build more than nine a week in the space as it is currently configured.

The company sold 296 grands last year, and another 36 uprights. But that's still a fraction of what Steinway, based in Long Island City, New York, sells in a year, and Mason & Hamlin in its best days couldn't compete with Steinway's marketing might. Now there are $6,000 grand pianos coming from China that are markedly better than those from a few years ago. Is there room for two American companies selling high-end grand pianos?

BRUCE BRUBAKER, WHO IS CHAIRMAN OF THE PIANO DEPARTMENT AT New England Conservatory, hopes there's room at the top. Even though he's a Steinway artist (that means he has a deal with the company) and loves its sound, "in the best world, one would try to give students some other experience."

Pianos don't sound the same. "You can hear a piano and know it's a Mason or a Steinway," Brubaker says. He thinks Steinway's bass thunders even more impressively than Mason's. But a Mason piano "has a pure, straight tone" that captures something unique about the music played on it.

Burgett is cautious, but he does talk about having some work done in China in order to remain competitive. "We're going to have to own something over there," he acknowledges, not another piano company but probably a business manufacturing parts. But he says that Mason & Hamlin won't ever take its factory overseas. "It'd destroy the company," he says.

Larry Fine, an industry arbiter based in Boston and author of The Piano Book, a comprehensive guide to new and used pianos with annual supplements, says there's nothing wrong with using Chinese-made parts, as long as there's quality control in the manufacturing. Mason & Hamlin wants more control over its parts, in fact, including the piano's action mechanism, the hammers and flanges that translate the push of a key into sounds from the strings. And loss of quality may not be a danger at a company where the engineers obsess about it to the point of shaving five-1,000ths of an inch at a time off the spoil boards.

What the Burgetts won't change are the things that make Mason & Hamlin pianos unique. The company will continue to fi t its soundboards in by hand rather than by machine, making it and Steinway the only big piano makers left that do this, according to Majeski of The Music Trades. The pin blocks, pieces of wood that hold the tuning pins in place and anchor the piano's wires, will continue to be made from quarter-sawn wood, which is much more expensive than wood cut in other ways, but much stronger. Mason & Hamlin pianos also use a patented crown tension resonator, a steel hub-and-spoke insert that the company claims helps the soundboard hold its crown (a slight belly in the thin board that helps the whole instrument carry the strings' tones). For that matter, Clark can go on at length about why soundboards made of Sitka spruce, used in Steinways, are inferior to those made of Eastern white spruce, used in Mason & Hamlin pianos.

It's a bit much to say that Mason & Hamlin competes with Steinway, which besides defining the piano as we know it, is an Armani in a field of bespoke tailors - and now, with the new Chinese competition, knockoff artists. Steinway is also part of a publicly traded company that had nearly $400 million in sales last year. That gives it the financial muscle to outdiscount and outmarket other high-end piano makers. For example, Steinway spent decades making sure its pianos sit on almost every concert stage in America.

What the Burgetts have proved is that there is room at the top, however, for grand pianos that aren't Steinways. That is the key to the company's next chapter - plucking out enough customers who want a well-made American piano but who otherwise would buy from Steinway, and persuading them that Mason & Hamlin's sound is better. "Most of the world's grand pianos borrow heavily from Steinway," says Majeski. "Mason & Hamlin is different."

Over its history of serial ownership and serial failure, successive owners bet on the name but lacked the fervor to make and market truly great instruments. Kirk and Gary Burgett are piano acolytes, and that fervor exists in their factory on Duncan Street. At least for now, Mason & Hamlin is back on its own three legs again.