Music: Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue
”; Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch
”; Kenny Dorham’s “Afro-Cuban
”.I thought it would be a relatively straightforward kind of productive workday. I saw the tasks laid out before me and was sure I’d be able to get right through them and have them done in an efficient amount of time.
I thought.
Turns out I spent most of my time looking for tools or researching tools or materials that I will need to complete the jobs I saw before me.
The biggest obstacle was a hole punch. Mrs. S is a big-time crafter, hobbyist, jewelry designer, one-time shadow-box-maker, with boxes of tools and craft supplies. I felt sure she had a hole punch that I could use to punch out some felt to finish the damper arms. And while she does indeed have a veritable library of hole punching and design punching tools, a plain old 3/8” round hole punch, which is what I needed, was sorely lacking. I tried a quarter inch punch, but the felt punching that resulted was just too small to do anything with. A failed preliminary search on the Internet led to a two-person tandem search that took a little more than half an hour, and resulted in me buying a hole punch kit (to be delivered by this Wednesday).
So, no punchings to finish the damper rods. I did glue the ones I bought for the upper side onto the wooden disks, so they are ready to attach once I can make the rest of the punchings.
All that, along with polishing the damper cover knobs, occupied the entire afternoon.
Polishing the damper cover holders was fun because, they were a very uniformly, not terribly ugly, flat black, and although I knew they were metal, I suspected they were just lead or tin or something and I was wondering what kind of paint I would use to brighten them up. Turns out a Dremel
with a wire brush fitting and a little patience was all it took to bring them back to their glorious shiny brass origins. The before-and-after photo below tells all:
In the morning I used my sanding mouse and the Dremel to start cleaning up the stool parts. Very tedious work, that. Those Dremel wire brushes aren’t cheap, but I’m going through two or three every weekend. When I was completely soaked through with sweat and couldn’t keep from dripping on the stool anymore, I gave that up for the day.
Oh, also in the afternoon, I washed the damper arms. Murphy’s Oil Soap
, a bucket, and a sponge. It looks like the upper portion of those arms was some kind of paper, so some of it scraped off, especially on the corners and edges. I’ll either have to leave it as is with that look of worn authenticity but uniformity, or else I’ll have to glue some of my own paper of some design onto it. Not sure how I’ll feel once I’ve got everything in place. By the way, one of the damper arms had already been broken and repaired once. It needed re-repairing, which was easy enough, but as I’ve been saying, I’m running into a lot of task interference on these various jobs.
I’m not sure that Labor Day is feasible as the day when I’ll be able to play this piano again. We’ll just have to keep pressing forward and see what happens…
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