Days 86 and 87 – Saturday and Sunday, May 21 and 22 – Devil in the Details

Goals: Put the leather on the hammers, install the keyboard assembly after checking that everything works

Music: Humphrey Lyttelton’s “The Parlophones” (all four discs); Bud Powell’s “The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume Three”; Buddy Rich’s “The Best of Buddy Rich”; Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite”.

Delicate, boring work. Boring and delicate. That’s all that separates me from a completely refurbished antique square grand piano: boredom and delicacy.

All I did on Saturday was cut the leather strips for the hammers and glue them to the hammerheads. That’s “all”. As I recounted in my last entry, I did not want to do this in stages because I was afraid of mixing the lengths. And, because I was using contact cement, I wanted them to be done all in one fell swoop. I was a little non-committal about whether I should put glue on the entire head and strip or just glue the ends with the body of the strip stretched over the hammerhead. I opted to leave the middle glue-less to give me some land to handle the strips with. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as I will relate in a moment.

One I got to cutting and placing the strips, I noticed they were all just about the right width, but most of them were too long (not sure why). Some I cut, some I used the extra surface for stronger adhesion. This, too, turned out to be fortuitous. Anyway, it took about four hours, but I managed to glue all the strips to the hammerheads.

On Sunday, I reviewed my work and naturally, all the strips were jamming into each other, causing all the keys to stick, pull multiple hammers, and not return to the down position properly. I expected this, and was sure they’d have to be cut. Here’s where not gluing the entire strip to the hammerhead paid off: I could trim the leather strip without having to trim a fat portion of the felt head. Nearly all them went smoothly. Some I could get just with the small pointy cosmetic scissors, but the majority required being held with tweezers while cutting with a razor. Due to placement issues, some I ended up cutting close to only about an eighth of their original width. That’s where the extra land for adhesion came in handy (for those strips that had it). Unfortunately, with my poor eyesight and inexperience, some of the strips I cut right through, releasing one end of the hammer. I used super glue to reattach these, not wanting to fuss with the contact cement any further. At the end of the session on Sunday, I was about twenty keys from the end, but that’s actually much closer to the end of this stage, because the high keys, which sit almost directly perpendicular to the strings and parallel to each other will not need any trimming. (Hooray!)

I have at least two wippens that will need adjusting before I can install the keys. Then, the sound of hammer hitting string and generating music will again emanate from my piano, almost one year to the day since the last note was heard from it.

I bought some clear acrylic resin that I’m planning to use to fix up the mother of pearl inlaid board. If I can get that to look pretty decent and the piano to play, I will have 99% succeeded in the refurbishing of this piano.