Days 62 and 63 – Friday and Saturday, November 26 and 27 – Anybody have the phone number for China?

Goals: Just get back to working on the piano, damn it!

Music: Mary Lou Williams’ “Free Spirits”; Eddie Condon’s “1927 - 1943”; Benny Carter’s “Further Definitions”; Clark Terry’s “Memories of Duke”; fight songs of Alabama and Auburn University. (Yes, I worked while watching football. And no, I didn’t skip a bunch of CD’s when I was working my way through the C’s in my collection; I got some new recordings and that’s what I listened to.)

Well, finally, I stopped making excuses or not making excuses and I just got back to work. On Friday, I worked on cutting little pieces of felt and leather to the right size to make the soft tabs for the soft board. I was a little dismayed at how hard it was to get my eyes to focus at a distance and then focus back up close while watching the football, and that made it go a little slower. By the time I had finished four tabs (eighty one more to go!), I was starting to think what a good idea outsourcing really is. I was not looking forward to Saturday at all.

And of course, on Saturday, Mrs. S’s first question to me was, are you going to work on that piano or not? (She said it a little differently.) So, I moved everything into the sunroom to take advantage of the better light, and I got down to it. I measured off and cut the felt and leather in three stages. As I cut each piece of felt, I also had to trim it to attach to the leather. Then, I cut the leather in matching sections, the same way I had removed the original ones from the soft board. When I had twenty or thirty ready to go, I brushed contact cement on the felt and then on the leather, then after attaching them, brushed the other end of the leather tab and then the marked spots on the soft board and attached them, going by the approximate number of the tabs that I matched the sizes to and compensating for slightly smaller or slightly larger ones by moving them a spot or two left or right. After two batches, I just had two sections not yet covered and I had original tabs from both the short and long ends of those sections, so I scaled my cuttings to match, repeated the gluing process, and four hours later, I forgot all about sending my piano to China. Here’s the end result:

Today, I’m going to do some heavy lifting, including felt and leather on the keys, reassembling the action, and moving the lid panels into the dining room to get them out of the bedroom before we have the carpet in there cleaned. Got to order some hinges for the panels, too.

I may have found a source for some of the parts I’m missing, too. I’ve started an email exchange and I’ll let you know how it goes...