Cremona Improved
Intermediate Spoolbox Drive

(Photograph courtesy of Art Reblitz)

Illustration from Cremona Style F piano #10267. This intermediate style Cremona spoolbox featured an improved chain and belt drive system that must have eliminated most of the service problems associated with the earlier all-belt drive system. Notice the chain drive to the music roll rewind shaft. Although a single belt, configured around two wooden step-pulleys, is still employed to make for easy music tempo adjustments this reliance on only a single belt, which was not under a lot of stress, probably gave little trouble. The next two designs eliminated the last remaining belt, but the three designs represented by numbers 3, 4, and 5 in our list seem to have been made concurrently for a number of years, with number 3 offered in pianos without an external speed control, and numbers 4 and 5 offered in more deluxe pianos that had one.