Sunday, June 6, 2010

Day 10 – Saturday, June 5:

Goals: Get the piano up on sawhorses; remove legs; repair dowels; remove casters and clean; begin refinishing legs.
Music: Air’s “Air Time”; Mose Allison’s “The Sage of Tippo” (both disks) (Kind of going in order through my collection – got a four CD Louis Armstrong set next...)

I’m not going to say much about putting the piano up on sawhorses other than, it should not be attempted by a middle-aged man and his wife in the middle of their dining room for any reason whatsoever. Mrs. S. and I succeeded nonetheless, and if there is any damage to the floor (what?), we won’t see it for another couple of months yet.

(!)

I removed the legs, marking their locations both on the dowels and the actual legs. I removed all the casters. They are very sturdy, heavy suckers, but I doubt I will remount them. One had a screw that was broken and required quite a bit of finagling to get it to turn to the point where I could grab it with something and twist it out. The other casters were not so difficult. Three of the four wheels were absolutely caked in dry mud. I can’t begin to imagine who thought it was a good idea to move that piano on those tiny casters through dirt of any kind, much less mud. I will say, that when I was washing the mud off, it had quite a unique “non-Alabama” smell to it. Not in a bad way, mind you, just I’d been working in the yard all day, and the smell of the old dirt coming off the casters was definitely out of the ordinary.

That was it. I started to clean the keys, but again, I want to talk to somebody before I do. I think today will just be removing, cleaning, and re-gluing the dowels. They’re pretty shaky as it is.

By the way, every single leg had “1498” stamped into it. (See photo) That’s obviously the number of my piano. The question now is: what the hell is that “6345” in the left front corner about?

No comments: