Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Days 84 and 85 – Saturday and Sunday, May 14 and 15 – Andddd...........next!

Goals: Finish the piano

Music: Gerry Mulligan’s “Original Quartet with Chet Baker” (both discs); Bennie Moten’s “Band Box Shuffle” (both discs); Paul Motian’s “The Sound of Love”, Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron’s “Complete Blue Note Recordings” (both discs).

With jazz improvisation class finally over, I have nothing but time for working on the piano. And after my trip to Memphis where I saw Francis Scott Key’s square grand piano and the non-functional shape it was in, I’ve been feeling a little inspired to get my piano back into operation. So I set to work.

Needless to say, there’s nothing left but a lot of little jobs, most everything cosmetic. I just take each job as I think of it and in whatever order necessary to complete the work properly. I obviously needed to get the key and hammer assembly back in, which meant repairing the one broken hammer and fabricating the missing one. Using spare parts that I bought on e-bay, I started with repairing the one broken hammer. It just needed a new pivot head (I’m calling it – I don’t know what it’s called). Not knowing how much of the shank goes into the pivot head, I decided to split the old one to see for sure. Here’s what that looked like: 
Bottom shows pivot head in mount assembly. Those pieces are the old pivot head. Uppermost is the original hammer and shank.

After that, it was an easy enough job to remove one of the old pivot heads from the spare parts, drill and scrape out the old shank bits, and sand and shorten the actual shank to fit into the hole. Wood glue and a little eyeball measuring next to the other hammers, and it was ready to install:
Repaired hammer ready for installation.

Manufacturing the replacement hammer for the one that was missing was a bit trickier and time consuming. Because the hammer has to fit between a bunch of other hammers, it needed to be sized correctly, but all of the parts I got off the internet were for the larger hammers at the other end of keyboard. I thought about sliding all of the hammers down one, but I was worried doing so might create fit issues down the line, especially with the felt pads that catch on the wippens. I didn’t want to deal with that , so I decided to see if it was possible to use my Dremel tool to whittle down the size of the felt on one of the big replacement part hammers to make a small felt head hammer. 
What I started with (left), and what I hoped to finish with, approximately (right)

I found that it was an easy enough process with the only drawback being that it generated a lot of dust, and so I set to manufacturing a replacement hammer, doing most of the felt trimming outside. That was a two day process due to the amount of sanding needed and also having to glue the felt, using contact cement to hold it and super glue to harden it. When all was said and done, I had my replacement hammer:
Left: What I started with; Middle: What I ended with; Right: What I was trying to get to

It fit adequately in the spot that had been missing a hammer for almost forever. (I could tell by the wear on the felt underneath the hammer housings.)
Here you can see how light the felt is where I removed the hammer, but how dark where the missing hammer was. That hammer was missing for a long time, telling me this piano has probably been unplayable - and unplayed - for 50 or more years.

I reattached the wippen stoppers and hammer assembly to the keyboard frame, holding the wippens in place with string when I fitted the hammers back in place. Upon releasing the string, I found all the keys and hammers in working order. (Thank God!) I wanted to slide the keys in to see and hear them hit the strings and hear what it sounded like, but I still had to put some leather over the worn surface of the hammers. What’s next is next, so I set to it.

I marked up the thicker portion of the lamb leather that I will be using to cover the hammer heads with, having measured and calculated that some time ago. 

The leather, ready to be cut (pencil for scale)
I didn’t start cutting up the individual strips, though, because I’m going to cut and glue and cut and glue those individually so that I don’t have to mark them up or anything. I’m not really sure which would be more tedious, cutting all then gluing, or cutting and then gluing as I go, and although I think splitting the jobs would be faster, cutting and gluing in tandem should be easier and make it easier to avoid mistakes.

So, without having enough time to tackle the leather gluing job, including the fact that the outside temperature was too low to open the windows, I moved to some other minor finishing jobs. So finally, I cut a few pieces of felt and threaded them through the strings, working from photos of the original state of the piano (always an inspiration).

I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do about the missing damper arm. Hopefully I’ll get lucky one of these days and come across some damper arms on the internet. Until then, I’m going to have one low, long-ringing F note.

When I finish the piano, that is.

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