Day 7 –Tuesday, June 1:

Goals: Nothing in particular – general cleaning, wood conditioning, photographing, noting condition, etc.

Music: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin’”; Cannonball Adderley’s “Somethin’ Else”

Back to the day job, so I didn’t have much time to work on the piano. I also didn’t have much energy. I did do some cleaning, and I packed up the rest of the tuning pins in their WD-40 bath in three of my fastener box’s drawers (which were the ideal length width and height to exactly hold three rows of twenty pins each with cardboard separators).  There were 159 pins total, so without making a note before the fact, I know that eleven keys were single string and 74 keys were double string. (Isn’t math a wonderful tool!?)

I vacuumed the hell out of the inside and wiped everything down with a light coat of lemon oil. I scrubbed at a few of the heavier areas of dirt and scraped a lot of wax off of the sound board and around the pin blocks and edges of the piano. (Pretty sure someone had a drippy candle on this sucker at one time or another.)

As I wiped down the wood that I could reach, I made an interesting discovery: another (what I believe to be a) serial number. Now, in the front of the piano, there is a small piece of wood with the number “6345” either burned or printed into it. Problem is, this piece of wood looks like it could possibly be not native to the piano. I say that because it looks like it was added after the fact, and is not really a part of any of the functioning pieces of the piano. Still, I took it to be the serial number, because I’m experienced enough to know that piano’s have a serial number and that tells you a lot about the piano.

Now, when I was meeting the former owner and looking over the piano, I seemed to remember her mentioning that C. H. Stone was a small company that was in business only “around five years” before the factory burned down.  To get to piano number 6345 then, they would have had to have been making over 1200 pianos a year. While certainly not out of the realm of possibility, it seems an unlikely number. Supposing they started at number 1000 and made, say, 1000 pianos a year, the 6345 number gets a little more realistic, but not much. So, I assumed that the history account of the C. H. Stone factory was probably the culprit, and I continued to assume the 6345 really was this piano’s serial number. But when I was wiping down the boards around the hammers, I removed some dust and discovered an ornate, engraved, “1498” right in the rosewood facing of the pin board. Voila! I’m now 90% sure that someone was trying to make that piano into something elaborate that it was not, and 100% sure they hadn’t a clue what they were doing. It’s a shame, really.

I’m no genius. I’m no expert. I’ve no experience and have never done anything like this before. I guarantee, nonetheless, that when I am through, I will know more about this piano than anyone in the last century ever did, and even if I don’t, I will be able to “manufacture” a more plausible, reasonable, and interesting history for this instrument than anyone else could ever have imagined.

On Wednesday, I’ve a piano lesson, so again, my piano will experience a day of R&R before I get back to it on Thursday. I expect my heavy duty sawhorses to arrive by then, so I’ll probably be going “down under”.