Machines have a natural lifespan, and I’m afraid that one of them is dying in my dining room.

“I wouldn’t put any more money into this,” is the way Alexander Felides, aka The Piano Doctor, put it after spending almost two hours wrestling with my upright player piano, a brand called Aeolian that was built in 1924. He sounded exactly like a physician warning that a beloved relative had slipped past the point of no return.

Many piano owners have heard a similar refrain. America was awash in pianos a century ago, when almost every home had one, and those instruments are nearing the end of their natural lives, headed to dumps or the back of barns.

It’s amazing they’ve lasted this long. A piano is an astonishing technology, with a lot of things that can go wrong. It has 88 sets of complicated mechanisms made of wood and metal and felt and glue, adding up to many thousands of interlocking parts.

Even the design is complicated. It’s not trivial to cause big metal strings stretched under hundreds of pounds of tension (two or three for each note) to play only when you hit a key, keep playing as long as you hold the key down and stop playing as soon as you lift your finger. A description of a piano key’s action contains a dozen steps, including head-scratchers like “the hammer falls back until it is stopped by the knuckle hitting the raised repetition lever; the jack can thus slip back under the partially raised hammer shank,” and so on.

As the years accumulate, wooden pieces snap, metal strings rust, felt and glue dry out, iron frames crack, soundboards warp. That’s when people like Felides enter the picture.

I called Felides, who used to work out of Derry but now is in Merrimac, Mass., when my piano had slipped so far out of tune that even my tinnitus-filled ears could hear it, and when the F-sharp above C wouldn’t stop playing even though I stopped playing it.

Felides came to my house and found that a hammer that was supposed to dampen the F-sharp had broken.

Fixing it should have been easy. But this is a player piano, full of tubes and bellows and chains and sprockets that worked the keys when a piano roll was turning. (The player mechanism doesn’t work, but it looks really cool.)

This mechanism kept Felides from getting at the damper hammer without doing more preparatory disassembly than I was willing to pay for, so he had to wing it.

Using a number of the weird specialty tools that piano repairmen carry, Felides was eventually able to extract the hammer. A spring that was supposed to push the hammer back onto the piano string when I released the F-sharp key had snapped.

He had no replacement but to my delight, he fixed it with a paperclip. “My wife calls this my MacGyver case,” he said, gesturing at his tool box.

Alas, the change in stress proved too much for the 88-year-old hammer. A tiny wooden flange broke, irreparably.

Undeterred, Felides swapped the hammer for another one from the upper reaches of the keyboard, where amateurs like me fear to tread.

This produced more complications, however, because every damper hammer has a slightly different shape due to the complex geometry of strings on the iron frame.

The player-piano mechanism got in Felides’ way again, preventing him from bending the hammer’s metal handle to adjust it properly. Again he winged it, poking various tools from above and from this side and that side, and after wrestling and sweating and grunting for a while, he finally got the hammer working reasonably well: “I bent the hell out of it,” he said.

It wasn’t perfect but it was as close as possible. And it was close enough, because rust on the strings means the piano can’t be perfectly tuned anyway and will never sound very good – but then again, neither do I.

The really bad news Felides delivered after tuning the piano is that the piano probably can’t be tuned again without spending much, much more money than it is worth. For financial reasons, my piano is slowly shuffling off this mortal coil.

After it dies, I’m sure I’ll be able to replace it with a freebie, since old pianos, dating from the instrument’s pre-radio heyday, are a glut on the market.

I got this one for free from somebody who had to move out of town, and it replaced an older freebie that had been in a barn for years.

I’ll be sad when it goes, because we have had a lot of fun over the years jointly mangling music. But all things must pass, even half-ton technologies.

Granite Geek appears Mondays in the Telegraph, and online at www.granitegeek.org. David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com.