Day 11 – Sunday, June 6:

Goals: Clean up the legs; solidly fix the dowels in each leg; clean up the lyre.

Music:            Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Fives and Sevens”, disks 1 and 2

In the morning, I took the legs outside and scraped all the mud and old wood off of the inside of the feet. It was a delicate job, because portions of the feet were missing on some of them, and other portions were about to go missing. So after I got them as clean as they were going to get, I got some polyurethane and coated the insides of the feet really well and touched up a few rough bare spots here and there where they were obvious.

After that dried, I set about fixing the dowels. The one that we had put in using toothpicks was amazingly well secured. After extracting the toothpicks, however, it came right out. I started to scrape the old glue and broken wood off, but that didn’t seem a very productive or worthwhile job. Instead, I just coated the whole inside of the leg with fresh wood glue and reinserted the dowel where it had been, driving it just a bit deeper than it was to make sure the glue secures it and to tighten it against the body of the piano a little better.

I cleaned up the lyre pedal assembly. The wood looks good and cleaned easily enough. It should not be a major problem reattaching it to the piano. I’m going to replace the rusty metal rods with new brass ones, and in fact have already found the brass rod material on Amazon.  

That’s really all I did. I have so many questions and so few answers at this point, I’m really just going to have to wait until the piano expert comes to my house and looks at the piano, and that won’t be until June 18. Maybe I’ll just play my digital piano in the meantime….