Day 13 – Tuesday, June 8:

Goals: Take care of cosmetic issues on the underside of the piano

Music: Grant Green’s “Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark” (both disks)

While I would prefer to be doing some tangible work on more critical aspects of the piano’s appearance and function, I have more questions than answers about what to do and how to do it, which prevent me from proceeding until I talk to someone to give me some information or until I look it up online or in my piano restoration book. So I picked some low hanging fruit by working on a few cosmetic issues underneath the piano.

Somewhere along the line, somebody thought it would be a good idea to use bondo and a big-ass wood screw to hold the pedals to the bottom of the piano, instead of running a rod through the dowels the way you are supposed to. So the first thing I did, which was also the easiest and by far the lowest hanging fruit, was to remove the bubble-gum pink bondo from the bottom of the piano and the hole. Because it wasn’t designed to hold to wood and because it was done in such poor fashion, the stuff came right off. Some was gunked up in the hole – you know, the hole that shouldn’t be there anyway – so I used a screwdriver to get all that out, and glued the one chipped splinter that was threatening to come off. I scraped all the obvious lumps of glue and gunk scattered here and there, then grabbed my old can of wood filler and putty knife and filled in all the holes. Inexplicably, next to the dowel holes for the back legs are two 1-inch diameter, 2-inches-or-so deep holes. They are too large to be filled with wood filler and they look like they have some purpose (or did at one time), so I’m going to ask the piano guy when he comes over about them. They will have to be filled with a piece of dowel, glue, and wood filler when (and if) we determine they need to be filled in.

All that took the entire evening and I haven’t even cleaned up the mess yet.

The only other thing I did was to use my wood burner kit to mark the legs and dowels more legibly so that they don’t get mixed up like they did when we moved the piano.

Tonight’s my piano lesson, and tomorrow’s the company’s first ever golf outing, so it will be the weekend before any more work is done on the piano. I’m thinking I’ll sand the underside and paint it. I’ll probably have to remove the pedal assemblies to do that, which is just as well, as they need all their felt replaced anyway. So I guess I have to buy some felt pretty soon, and…and…and…

It’s a logistical nightmare keeping up with all that is needed or will soon be needed. Hopefully, this experience will make my next piano project go smoother.