Saturday, September 4, 2010

Day 47 – Sunday, August 22: Not much, but it’s something

(I'm about to get back into working on the piano. Here's an entry from the spell when I was hardly working on it, the last three weeks.)

Goals: Get back in the swing of things as much as the heat will allow.

Music: Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Kirkatron

This has been a recurring theme these last three weeks, but, it’s been hot outside. It prevents working on the piano top, doing any outdoor stain work, or opening the windows to do indoor stain work. And, stain work is the next thing that needs to be done. So I’ve been looking for the odd jobs that don’t depend upon putting the piano back together. I still have to touch up the harp (again, need open windows, probably), and about half the felt work on the keyboard (a job that can be done any time and doesn’t need special attention. Then there’s cleaning and staining the stool, and doing the fine engraving work on the mother-of-pearl inlay. That also requires outdoor work to keep the dust to a minimum, and even as hot as it was, I decided to give those last two a try.

My new engraving tools for the Dremel really work great. I was able to clean out all of the old glue from where the mother of pearl pieces had fallen off the decorative board. What I was finding, however, was that whoever did the original job use some kind of plastic resin filler that looks like mother of pearl, but isn’t. That drastically increases the amount of work that board is going to require. So, I spent about an hour cleaning that. Then I went to work on the stool. I cleaned up the stool for about an hour as well. I was dripping with sweat, so I stopped. I did not attempt any more jobs inside or outside on the piano.

So, as the title says, it wasn’t much, but it was something. I’m working on my piano, again, even if in a limited fashion.

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