Days 57 and 58 – Saturday and Sunday, October 16 and 17 – Back on the Job:

Goals: Work on the mother-of-pearl inlay; start restringing.

Music: Stan Getz’s “Focus”; Terry Gibbs’ “Dream Band”. (Focus is probably Stan Getz’s best work ever. It features him backed by a full orchestra, but due to the sudden death of his mother, the orchestra recording session went on without him. He recorded his tracks later and when his and the orchestra’s tracks were put together, magic!)

On both Saturday and Sunday, I worked on the inlay for about an hour and a half each day, without music, so I could concentrate on what I was doing. The result was quite good, but, I’ve decided I’m done inlaying. I’m going to paint the remaining gaps black and accent them with gold paint. Or, since I still have some blanks, maybe I’ll put just a few more pieces in, just to brighten it up a little bit. (I’m getting pretty good at it, but man, it is tedious work.)

Speaking of tedious work, after touching up the stain on the inside of the piano around the harp trim, I decided to start restringing. Holy crap, is that hard! I spent an hour and a half and finished four double strings. It is incredibly difficult to get the lengths of wire right and it is basically impossible to get clean spools of wire on the pins. The end result is it doesn’t look like much, but the strings are on and they make a semblance of tonal sound when struck. I’m not sure, but I’m thinking about redoing them. Probably I will just keep going, but if I reach the point where I can actually make the pins and strings look good, I will likely go back and make the first few crappy ones look more like the rest. That assumes of course that I will get some skill and actually become halfway talented at putting strings and tuning pins in, at some point, and hopefully before I get to the irreplaceable wound strings. (It would totally suck to break one of them like I broke the one that I tried to do slightly different to make a nice looking spiral. Enough about that, though.)

So, there is no way I’m going to finish the piano this month. There is just too much slow, hard work left. Thanksgiving is a realistic goal, but Christmas seems more likely. I definitely bit off more than I can chew with this project, but now there’s nothing to do but to keep eating until I finish the meal or start puking.