Days 88 and 89 – Saturday and Sunday, May 28 and 29 – Looks like a piano!

Goals: Finish with the leather on the hammers and install the keys

Music: Shelley Manne and His Men’s “Complete Live at the Blackhawk” (all four discs).

With the keys inserted back in the piano, it again looks like a piano and the temptation to chop it into a desk or a bar is reduced. As has been the case throughout this project, however, the piano continues to beset me with “good news, bad news” scenarios:

-Good news: I successfully manufactured a replacement hammer from scrap hammers purchased online. Bad news: I wasn’t actually missing a hammer. The space on the hammer assembly is for something else. (Wish I knew what.) At least that explained why I ended up one piece of leather short when I was adding leather to the hammers.

-Good news: I successfully rebuilt the pivot arm end of a broken hammer. Bad news: The difference in shape and size is just enough that the wippen didn’t pick it up and project the hammer correctly. Hard to believe when you look at the photo – we’re talking a fraction of a millimeter difference! (I ended up shimming the whole assembly to make it work; it still joined the ranks of dead keys after the first go around.)

Top is the replacement, bottom is an original. Yeah, they're different, but...

-Good news: I finished putting the leather on all the hammers. Bad news: Even with careful and thorough trimming, the tiny size differential makes many of the keys stick, both against each other and against parts of the piano when the keys are reinserted.

Hammers all covered in leather and ready to go.

The pile of leather chunks that took be two days to trim from the heads - and they still don't work right.

-Good news: I was able to insert the keys and a number of them actually hit on the strings they were supposed to and made a passable sound. Bad news: After playing once through the keyboard, any number of keys went dead, or took some jiggling to get playing again, or didn’t sound at all in the first place.

-Good news: The rough tuning of the piano means I have actually gotten a reasonable facsimile of harmonic sound from the strings. Bad news: Not realizing that some of the “single” bass strings were actually “double” bass strings, I’ve got the piano tuned to play more notes than there are keys.

Good news: At the lower end of the keyboard, all the keys work. Bad news: The ones that are supposed to be hitting double strings are only hitting one string. (Maybe it doesn’t matter if I tune them or not.

Memorial Day will be filled with tuning work and key adjustment. I’m even going to have to get my piano repair manual out and see what my options are with the wippens that aren’t triggering the keys right after I just fixed them. (I mean, of course I made sure all the keys were working before I reinserted them, but I didn’t think so many would go dead right out of the gate!)

One more: Good news: The soft pedal actually moves the damper assembly into position and deadens the hammer strike on the strings. Bad news: It doesn’t go back on its own. More adjustment!