Day 26 – Friday, July 2 – Another Full Day:

Goals: Do whatever can be done

Music: The Complete Blue Note and Pacific Jazz Recordings of Clifford Brown (disks 1, 2 and 4).

Worked on fabricating the missing piece of the leg. Because it is too intricate and not very critical, I’ve given up trying to make the small missing piece on the other leg. If I can make the one I’m fabricating now look really good without much hassle, I may go for it, but all in all, I’m thinking it is too minor of a cosmetic issue with a piano that old, and I’m content to tolerate the imperfections for now. We’ll see how I feel as things progress.

So, to make that piece for the leg, I sawed and sanded a small block into the approximate shape that I wanted. I wood-filled the portion of the leg it will attach to in order to make the surface flat, then I will glue and brad that piece to the leg, being careful to keep its bottom portion just above the bottom of the actual leg so it doesn’t end up bearing any weight and breaking off. Then wood fill again and stain and finish. That’s all yet to come. So far, I just made the little block and prepped the leg. That’s all.

I continued to work on gluing the key tops to the key levers. I’ll probably be able to finish those up during the next work session.

I spent the rest of the time working on the harp. I cleaned the agraffes and they look really shiny and wonderful. I cleaned all the dirt and grime off the top surface, evened out the previous paint jobs as much as I could, and shined up the string holders. The agraffes and string holders will all have to be masked for the paint job, and that will be tedious to say the least. I may do that during the next session.

After I got the front as good as I’m going to be able to get it, I started work on the bottom. The bottom had some waxy residue from when somebody spilled some wax on the thing. Unfortunately, somebody else decided to paint over the remainder wax, so it couldn’t readily be removed with a wire brush. I used a putty knife to scrape and chip away most of the wax-paint blobs, then wire-brushed everything down as good as I could. I started to be a lot more diligent about things, but I finally reminded myself; this is the underside of something that very few people (if any ever again) will ever see, so I cut to the chase, stopped the scraping, got everything close to even with the wire brush, brushed off all the residue, ran over it once with a tack cloth, then spray painted it. The harp is now half finished.

Thinking about it that way, it makes me want to go out, finish cleaning it up, mask the pins and agraffes, and paint it, because then, I’ll have finished another portion of the piano.

Oh, and I found out that the pins holding the pedal arms and the pins that should hold the pedal assembly are not the same size and that the brass rod I already bought may well be small enough to do the job, so I don’t have to buy more brass rod after all, and the extra work I did to clean the steel rods that I thought I would be replacing won't be going to waste.