Day 37 – Monday, July 19 – Unplanned Uptime

Goals: No thought or planning was undertaken for this session of work

Music: None. I was concentrating.

I found myself with dead time in the early evening, as I ran out of poker chips on the website I play on, and Pawn Stars wasn’t going to start for another hour and a half, so I decided to tackle some odd jobs on the piano.

Not wanting to get dirty and sweaty, and not wanting to have to pull out a whole bunch of tools and stuff, I decided to touch up the brass rods for the pedal assembly with the Dremel, and reattach the pedal assembly. After grinding the rods, I inserted them and they were uneven, meaning the felt had fallen off of one of the pedals. So I took the assembly apart and used rubber bands to hold the felt pads in place, and put everything back together again. Realizing I still hadn’t manufactured the rods to hold the assembly, I cut some off the brass rod material that I bought for that purpose and ground them down like the others. I had to drill out the holes a little bit to fit the larger rod material. I could have gone ahead and attached the pedal assembly except for two things. One is I wanted to bend the brass rods a little to keep them from slipping completely out, but I wasn’t able to do so with pliers and channel locks and my hands, so I knew I’d have to bring them to work and have someone in the shop do it for me. Two is the piano sits just a bit too low to attach the pedal assembly, since I removed the casters from the legs and didn’t replace them. (Thankfully, it is high enough that if I raise the piano up a bit, I can attach the pedal assembly and then let the piano back down and still have some clearance. Whew!)

I also experimented with a piece of wood and my Dremel to see if I could hollow out the shape of the brass letters I plan to insert in the piano. The short answer was, “No way”. The bit on the Dremel tore the crap out of the wood, and precise cutting of the exact shape of the letters is completely out of the question. That means, I’ll have to hollow out enough to insert the letters, then back fill and paint around them to smooth it out. I’m not sure that will work. I’m not sure what kind of fill material can be used. I’m not even sure it could be finished smooth. The letters are also kind of big and close together. I may have to develop some other way of using the letters or give up on the idea entirely. It would suck to have $130 worth of brass lettering that I could use at all, though. I’m going to have to come up with something.

So, no plan, no organized approach, yet I still invested another hour and thirty minutes into my piano.