Day 39 and 40 – Saturday, July 24 and Sunday, July 25 – Back to the grind

Goals: Get the harp ready for priming and prime; varnish the soundboard; practice engraving techniques with the Dremel (that’s going to be hard); start work on the impossibly numerous and minute pieces of felt and leather that must be replaced.

Music: Miles Davis’ “Milestones”; Ornette Coleman’s “At the Golden Circle” (volumes 1 and 2); Chick Corea’s “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs”; John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and “Crescent”; Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band’s “Act Your Age”.

I’m so sick of the harp not being finished, that I thought I would try to knock that out this weekend. The problem I’m having is that with the heat and humidity, the weather doesn’t allow the paint to go on and dry properly. I figured I would just grind the hell out of the thing and spray paint it early in the morning the next day.

But after cutting the grass in that heat and humidity, I could really only spend about an hour prepping the harp. That left me with another hour of prepping on Sunday, so it was almost 11:00 by the time I got to the paint. I actually was planning to wait on the paint, but I noticed that since I’ve stripped it down to the metal, a thin coat of dusty corrosion forms on parts of the harp if I let it sit for a short time. There was nothing for it. I sprayed the primer on after masking all the pins, and that seemed to work okay. I had a few areas with some bubbles from the sprayer not spraying right, but with the paint partially dried, I was able to press them out. I may not even have to sand before the final coat goes on. We’ll see.

For good measure, I spray painted the damper cover too.

Saturday afternoon I also put a coat of varnish on the soundboard. I’m pretty sure I’m done with that. It did not really help the shims blend in, but everything looks quite good nonetheless. Varnish is pretty tricky to handle indoors, and it’s not at all like painting, and personally, I’d rather deal with polyurethane, but I’m going for some authenticity here. So, I think one coat of varnish is all it’s going to get.

Finally, I started the felt and leather work. I’m experimenting with the best ways to attach felt and am having some success with two sided tape. The problem with it is that it is difficult to handle and it takes the most time, because the pieces of tape have to be cut to the right size or else they stick out and don’t look so pretty. That’s why I decided that anything visible will get glued, and anything that requires more than, say, ten of something, I’ll try to use glue. At the same time, I’m also experimenting with different types of glue. Plain old Elmer’s gives the best finish, but doesn’t always stick well. Contact cement sticks the best for most applications, but it’s a pain to handle. Superglue works wonders, but it can be tricky to handle, too, and it isn’t really too good on the cloth (felt) applications. Basically, I’m just going to keep sticking stuff as best I can however I can and leave it at that.

So for starters, I tackled the two pieces of felt that go on the key levers. Because the felt I bought is half the thickness of what’s on the keys, I had to do two of everything, but I quickly figured out that it isn’t that difficult if you make everything twice the size it needs to be then cut it in half. I used Elmer’s to glue the two halves of each piece together, so with 59 damper push pads and 85 keys in total, I cut almost 300 pieces of felt over a period of about two hours. It looks like I’ll have to use contact cement on the small pads that go over the wippen spring, because that is hollowed out underneath and I can’t afford to get any glue on the spring, in which case, I might just use contact cement on the back felt as well. I’m about out of Elmer’s, anyway. Here's what that looks like. The dime is for perspective.

I tried to use my felt cutting technique on the leather for the hammer catchers, but leather is a different beast than felt or paper. I’m probably going to have to use an Exacto knife and cut each piece individually, in order to compensate for the grain, texture and topography of the leather.

It was a full weekend. Next chance I get, I plan to finish up the harp so I can begin the wood refinishing process.

Day 38 – Tuesday, July 20: Killing time

Music: The Theme from South Park

I decided to work on the small detail stuff, mainly felt and bushings and the like, while watching TV in the future. That way I can get more done by multi-tasking a little. So it was a pretty simple operation. I reinstalled the felt on the keyboard rack. Measured the punchings for the keys and reinstalled them. Then I checked the keys for accurate movement. (They moved.) And while that doesn’t sound like much, that will save about one hour of work in the future.

There are going to be a lot more entries like this one, as there is lots of precision cutting, trimming, and gluing to be done with the felt work.

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.

Day 36 – Sunday, July 18 – Veneer not far

Goals: Mount the veneer; get the piano back on its legs.

Music: Nat ‘King’ Cole’s “After Midnight”; Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis’ “Very Saxy”; Miles Davis’ “Birth of the Cool”; Jimmy Giuffre’s “Free Fall”.

Another first today, as I installed my first piece of veneer ever. I bought the good kind (toxic kind) of contact cement for the job, so with the plastic up over the doors, I shut the air conditioner vent and opened the windows and turned on the fan. Here's the piano and the veneer at the start of the project:

The cement went on pretty easily and because the veneer was a good bit larger than the back of the piano all the way around, I was able to leave enough of the edges clear that Mrs. S and I could handle the material without gluing it to our hands. We weren’t quite ready for the veneer to stick as easily as it did, so we didn’t have it quite as tight as I would have liked, but when I pressed it down with the ‘J’ roller, all but one of the bubbles disappeared. I cut it opened and reglued it, and it looks sort of rough, but I’m pretty sure when I do the stain that it will look just fine. I cut the edges off with my Dremel, and sanded everything smooth, even and with rounded edges to compensate for the increased height of the veneer, and now, even with the bubble patch, it looks one-thousand percent better. And after all, it’s the back of the piano. Here's the result:

While the veneer was setting, I trimmed the soundboard crack shims and sanded them smooth. I had to redo one of the large cracks because it didn’t take for whatever reason, and I ended up having a little gap left over. I was going to fill it with wood filler, but decided against that. Instead, I’m just going to leave it and count on the strings and harp to cover it up enough that nobody will really notice. I still also have the varnishing to do, and that should help with the appearance of the cracks as well.

I closed out the day by reattaching the legs. Because I inserted the screw dowels with just a little twist to them to tighten them against the piano’s underside, and because I painted and patched the underside, only two of the four legs went on smoothly. For one of the other two legs, I had to scrape off some of the wood filler that I put on the bottom (which in hindsight was a mistake, because it isn’t visible anyway, being in between the leg and the piano bottom). For the other, I had to sand it like four or five times to finally get it to fit, and I had to bang the crap out of it, injuring my hand in the process. But with the legs on, I had Mrs. S pull out the sawhorses and we set the piano on the floor once again. After sitting up on those thirty inch sawhorses for the last month, the piano looked positively tiny when it was lowered back down to the floor. I’m sure it will look massive again in a few days, but right now, it does not.

Next phase is going to have to be to get the harp in shape, because I need to start working on the lid panels. Those will have to be done in stages, and there are three of them, so the sooner I start on them, the sooner I can have them finished. That means I need to finish up the harp to free up my sawhorses. I also will not be able to avoid the felt work and inlay work much longer. Although some things are getting done, there is still much to do.

Day 35 – Saturday, July 17 – Back to work

Music: John Coltrane’s “Blue Train”; Terry Gibbs’ Dream Band’s “One More Time – Vol. 6”; Sonny Criss’ “Sonny's Dream: The Birth of the New Cool”; Freddy Cole (with Bill Charlap)’s “Music Maestro, Please”. (Grammy nominated, that last one. I own a signed copy!)

Spent about fifteen minutes in the garage with the Dremel and the harp. I completely wore out one stainless steel wire brush bit and exhausted the battery, but man, does that clean up good! I’m going to have to go through at least three more of them things, which Mrs. S was kind enough to pick up yesterday on her way home from shopping.

I spent the rest of the day inside. I chiseled out the four cracks in the soundboard, then glued and inserted the shims. They need twenty four hours to dry completely, so I won’t touch them again until Sunday. Here what one looked like before and after shim insertion:

I worked on cleaning up the soundboard after that. I really cleaned the serial number board in the front, and I re-inked the serial number. It was a tedious, slow, meticulous job, but I took it nice and easy and it looks great. Success is in the details, and the details of this piano are certainly there.

I glued felt to the bottom of the legs. As soon as I finish the veneer, I’ll re-attach them and away with the sawhorses.

Then I reamed out all 159 of the tuning pin holes. Then I vacuumed up the mess.

It was a full day’s work, including wiping up cat pee two more times. I’m done with that, though. I’ve got plastic up to keep the dust in and the cats out.

 (And as you can see, the cats already found a way to get behind the plastic, but these are the two non-perpetrators of the cat pee caper. And no, they are not robots, that's just the cool flash effect you get when you put them behind plastic and the flash in front.)

Day 34 – Friday, July 16 – Seeing a man about a piano

Music: None. (We were talking.)

In my efforts to learn something about square grand pianos before purchasing one, I was introduced to Dr. B. He’s been around pianos for a long time, has his own piano restoring and tuning business, and has experience with square grands. Long about when I bought the piano, he and I talked by phone about it, and he expressed an interest in seeing the piano and possibly, advising me on some “dos and don’ts” of the refurbishing process.

So in June, he and I met and he looked over the piano and the work I was doing. He gave me a strong vote of confidence, as he told me I seemed to be doing a good job and was going about the process in the correct manner. He was also kind enough to offer to help me purchase parts as cheaply as possible as well as lend me some of the tools I would need for the process.

Today, July 16, he brought over the tuning pins and spoon bit that I would need for the piano. He also brought me sundry tools that I would need to fix my piano: a wire spool device, a shim chisel, a pin driver, and a soundboard wedge chisel, among other things. He even brought some shims (although I had purchased some already). He spent a good twenty minutes explaining everything and making sure I understood what was in store for me as my project progressed. He even posed for a picture or two for posterity’s sake.

(a couple of shim tools...)

I’m sure we’ll hear more from Dr. B before this is all over.

Day 33 – Thursday, July 15 – New Music, same old piano

Music: Kenny Burrell’s “Ellington is Forever” (just bought this, which is why I jumped back to the ‘B’s even though I’m almost finished with the ‘C’s in my collection).

I’ve got to see a man about my piano on Friday, as he’s bringing the tuning pins, the spoon bit and the soundboard shim chisel for my piano, so I thought I would take advantage of an evening home alone to get the piano parts organized and everything cleaned off of it so it can actually be worked on. But I had another brief, but disgusting, set back: cat pee.

One of the perils of owning three cats is, they sometimes express their independence in “unique” ways. And none of our cats are particularly prone to these nasty behaviors, but every so often, something unexpected like this happened. I won’t belabor the point. The mess was contained on the floor protecting tarp, and although the clean up job was relatively easy and straightforward, the smell lingered. This is merely a point of reference: all projects like these are prone to be affected by outside events, and they do cause delays, however momentary and tolerable. (But, oh, the smell!) (That’s also one of the prime reasons I don’t keep tools and parts on the floor anymore.

Anyway…

I vacuumed all the surfaces of the piano carefully. I sanded and steel-wooled the visible portions of the soundboard as well, and I think it is about as close to finished as it is going to get. I started to look at the cracks and shims and seeing what will need to be done there, but that is going to be the main subject of discussion with the piano expert on Friday: shim installation. So, all I did was sand and clean, sand and clean, in preparation for today’s meeting and for this weekend’s installation of shims and veneer. The other main tasks will be to put felt on the legs and re-install them, and take the Dremel to the harp and get the last of the old paint and rust off. I could even spray paint the harp, now that I think about.

Forward, we go.