Day 77 – Sunday, February 13 – Finally, some success

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano.

Music: Ornette Colemans’s “Beauty is a Rare Thing” discs 3 and 4.

After making excuses for an entire month (shame on me!), I decided yesterday that I could not put it off any longer, and I needed to try the metal shims I bought and see if they would solve the problem of the loose tuning pins. I found the middle A strings and amazingly, they were still in tune. B-flat right above had one of the problem tuning pins, which I had already removed and left in that state, so I got my tin shears and cut me a tapered shim, quarter inch at the bottom, a little more at the top. I had a little trouble getting it seated at first, and although it was a crisp, tight fit, when I had the pin turned in and strung, it held. I tuned that pair of strings to B-flat and moved to B, C, and C#, all of these needed a shim on both pins. Long story short, it was tedious process, but the metal shims worked on every tuning pin I’ve tried them on so far (tapping forehead in lieu of wood), and my piano is, in fact, tunable. More importantly, I’ve been able to use the wires that I’ve already strung onto the piano, so I’m going to save a lot of work in not redoing all the pins and wires (a scenario I had been trying to mentally prepare for, but which I was increasingly going to face by tearing everything out of the piano and inserting an electronic keyboard instead.

Now, I have every reason (and no excuse not) to work on the thing. It may actually be able to be completed, maybe in just a couple of weeks. I’m praying for bad weather next weekend so I can stay in, drink brandy tea, and work on the sucker. I really want to get everything back inside the piano, up off the floor and finish turning the dining room into a music room. But the piano has to be first, so, no more excuses.