Days 73 and 74 – Friday and Saturday, December 30 and 31 – A Smattering Modicum of Advancement

Goals: Finish the metal wire “stringing”; order parts to move on to the final stages.

Music: Paul Bley’s “Time Will Tell”; Charles Gayle’s “Touchin’ on Trane”; Dave Douglas’s “Convergence”; Michel Petrucciani’s “Solo Live”.

The hardest thing I have had to deal with in this late stage of the piano restoration is figuring out how to make the wires the correct length so that they wrap neatly around the tuning pins and yet still hold the wire at or near the correct tension. I suppose one is supposed to not cut the wire, but rather, string it on one pin, pull it down to the holding pin, pull it back to the second pin, then cut the correct length at that point. Unfortunately, on a square grand, several of the wires have to pass under a frame brace or a damper arm support, and several more have the back pin under the actual frame of the piano. Needless to say, it is not possible to pass a coil of wire through these narrow spaces. That leaves only the option of cutting the wire to length. This is tricky, due to the bends the wire has to take around the pin blocks and due to the unsure wrapping requirement, which depends so much on the pin tension, which depends so much on the condition of your 130-year old piece of pine wood pin block. It’s a process and a guessing game and a lottery, all rolled into one. I finally figured out that I could just measure the longest string for the given wire gauge, then shorten it once I had it partially strung. If that string seemed too short before I’d got to the end of that gauge wire, I could make the next one a few inches longer, and that would limit the amount of wasted wire that ended up being too short to reach the tuning pins.

(Too late, this led to another realization: I could have done short and long wires of different gauges at different stages of the restringing to hold the felt pieces in the correct positions, instead of adjusting the felt as I went. Although I did not end up with an especially unattractive felt pad, its hole alignment also is not perfect. Again, hindsight is 20-20, and I make this note here not only to admit my inexperience, but also to hopefully help someone else avoid this problem. Note also: I’m not sure how much harder – or easier – the actual stringing would have gone with this strategy, as the stringing was hard enough without having to do it in between two sets of strings. Maybe I’ll try it in a limited context on my next piano refurbishing project.)

When all was said and done, after a two day push, the second day of which really was a push until late into the evening (even after an early start), all the double-strung wire strings (52 of them) are complete. To celebrate, I drank some Cajun-spiced rum that we bought in New Orleans, and I ordered a set of larger pins and a socket adapter for touching up the wire strings and finishing the 33 wound strings. (I’m expecting many more of the holes in the lower end to be unable to hold tune with the narrow pins, due to the fact that I reamed those first and did a much more thorough job than on the higher register ones, and the increased tension of the larger strings.

Anyway, here’s a shot of the stringing so far, pre-pin adjustment/re-installation/rough tuning.