Days 69 and 70 –Saturday and Sunday, December 18 and 19 – Trouble

Goals: Pain and torture (seems like)

Music: Joe Henderson’s “The State of the Tenor” (both discs)

Things have, well, not been going, um, well.

On Saturday, I felt quite happy with the appearance of the inlay board, so I was ready to give it a clear top coat to seal in all my work and call it complete. With three possible options – spar varnish, water-based poly urethane, and oil based acrylic – I thought a little experimentation was called for. So on the reverse side of the board, I carved out an “E” (for “experiment” or “Eric”) and filled it with the colored wood filler that I used on the front. When that dried, I coated over it with the three stripes of the coatings in close proximity and allowed them to dry. Here's the before and after of that:

Before - no coatings

After - poly urethane, oil poly, varnish (top to bottom)

Both the oil based products looked a little too shiny for me, and one of them (the varnish) was still a bit tacky even after two hours or so. I also had some concern that the oil-based products would be too strong and would probably take off some of the lighter touches of ‘art’ that I had done on the board. It seemed that the water-based poly urethane was the way to go.

So I put the board on some newspapers and coated it. The result was 80% of the artwork that I had done on the mother-of-pearl pieces came off in the process. Since I don’t have a means to spray coat the thing, that was always going to be the result, in hindsight. Still I was amazed at how easily things like lines drawn by a Sharpie, charcoal pencil ground into the crevices, and make up powder, just came right off. That’s the bad news. The good news is, the dullness of the finish improved the overall appearance enough that the loss of detail is not that significant.

I’m still considering my option of replacing that board entirely and using the brass letters to do an inlay on the piano that will make up for the loss of the mother-of-pearl work. We’ll see.

On Sunday, it was back to stringing. I wouldn’t say that it didn’t go well, but the issue is I’m having more and more pins end up being loose and untunable, and it has been a struggle to get the length of the longer wires correct. I’ve resorted to laying out a tape measure on the floor and making all the wires two inches longer than I calculate, and even at that I’ve had one come up short somehow. As for the untunable pins, I still haven’t decided what to do and none of my consultants have dropped me a line, so I’ll have to call one today to get the low down. I think I’m just going to get two dozen larger pins and if that doesn’t work, do some shims.

Bottom line: the piano will not be finished by Christmas, and I will have to continue to listen to Mrs. S complain about the lack of a dining room/music room every time I point out I have nowhere to store my burgeoning CD collection.