Day 35 – Saturday, July 17 – Back to work

Music: John Coltrane’s “Blue Train”; Terry Gibbs’ Dream Band’s “One More Time – Vol. 6”; Sonny Criss’ “Sonny's Dream: The Birth of the New Cool”; Freddy Cole (with Bill Charlap)’s “Music Maestro, Please”. (Grammy nominated, that last one. I own a signed copy!)

Spent about fifteen minutes in the garage with the Dremel and the harp. I completely wore out one stainless steel wire brush bit and exhausted the battery, but man, does that clean up good! I’m going to have to go through at least three more of them things, which Mrs. S was kind enough to pick up yesterday on her way home from shopping.

I spent the rest of the day inside. I chiseled out the four cracks in the soundboard, then glued and inserted the shims. They need twenty four hours to dry completely, so I won’t touch them again until Sunday. Here what one looked like before and after shim insertion:

I worked on cleaning up the soundboard after that. I really cleaned the serial number board in the front, and I re-inked the serial number. It was a tedious, slow, meticulous job, but I took it nice and easy and it looks great. Success is in the details, and the details of this piano are certainly there.

I glued felt to the bottom of the legs. As soon as I finish the veneer, I’ll re-attach them and away with the sawhorses.

Then I reamed out all 159 of the tuning pin holes. Then I vacuumed up the mess.

It was a full day’s work, including wiping up cat pee two more times. I’m done with that, though. I’ve got plastic up to keep the dust in and the cats out.

 (And as you can see, the cats already found a way to get behind the plastic, but these are the two non-perpetrators of the cat pee caper. And no, they are not robots, that's just the cool flash effect you get when you put them behind plastic and the flash in front.)