Post #10 - The Cleaning

As you might have seen in the earlier picture of the key bed after I got the keys out, the inside of the piano was filthy - which bodes well for anyone looking for treasures.  The dirtier, dustier the space is, the less chance someone else has gotten in before you and made off with whatever trinkets might have been dropped or lost in the depths.

Of course, there was that disturbing discovery about the key felts and a potential predecessor.  Since I had already exposed the key bed and found nothing, I've written that particular area off the potential treasure map - whoever worked on the keys got anything that might have been there...

Unfortunately, these pictures are going to end up too small to do real justice to the amount of dust and crud inside.  We're not talking dust bunnies, but rather dust jack rabbits.  A sane man would don a mask and gloves prior to attempting this; having neither a mask or gloves available at the time - and less sanity than I'm usually given credit for - I just broke out the vacuum cleaner (with hose attachment), dry cloths, and some wood cleaner I purchased specifically for the task.  As much as possible, I figured this would be a dry cleaning - but I knew there's be places where some sort of cleaner would be necessary.  I'd already seen one, on the right side of the key bed.

Since most of the pictures will not adequately show a before/after difference, I won't bore you with all the grisly details, but concentrate on the grosser areas.

I started at the top, thinking that anything that got knocked loose and missed would fall to the bottom of the piano and I'd get a second chance there.  The top of the soundboard was relatively clean and whole - one crack or split, which I showed in an earlier post.  No surprises.

There was a good amount of dust and grimy stuff trapped between the strings and the soundboard on the upper part of the harp and on the hammer arms.  This was kind of delicate...  The stuff directly behind the strings was adequately sucked out and disposed of by the vacuum cleaner; the hammers, on their 1/4" dowel arms, took a lot longer and quite a bit of patience to get cleaned up.  The felts, while not exactly clean, looked to be in good condition (another possible sign someone had been at this before me).

That brought me to the grodiest part I had seen so far - the key bed.  Being horizontal and given that there are spaces between each of the keys, this is a natural dust and dirt collector - and it did not disappoint.



Now, a lot of that vacuumed out easily.  But then I got to the right side.  Quite obviously, someone had spilled some liquid, most probably something sticky at the extreme right side - probably accounting the "water" mark I commented on earlier on the outside of the key bed side.  And, having spilled it, didn't know how to get below the keys to clean up, so just let it dry down there.

Now, hopefully you can see the difference in the two pictures, the top one being from the center of the key bed; the bottom one being the right corner.  There is fuzz growing there.  Or did until it ran out of nutrients and just turned into toxic crud.  And it's not just a thin layer of dust and grime, this section was 1/4" thick or more in spots.  The key pads and felts were entirely rotted away.  No amount of vacuum suction was going to clean this (and I tried) and I was really wishing for a HazMat suit at this point, screw the mask and gloves.

In the end, it took a dull scraper to get all the crap out of that section, and I had to remove more interior pieces to make sure I got at every hidden area that I could.  Then the whole bed got rubbed down with wood cleaner and a light wax to try to seal it.  In the end, I was pleasantly surprised - you can tell that something was spilled, but it no longer looked like the cesspool it started out as...





You can still see the liquid stain in the lower right corner of the bottom picture - that was hidden under all the fuzz.  Without taking everything apart and sanding it all down, I don't see anyway to get rid of that.  And, since it's hidden beneath the keys and no one will ever see it, that's more work than I want to do at this point.  At least the key bed is no longer a biological experiment and/or hazard at this point.

No hidden treasure under that fuzz, either.  I have to admit I was kinda glad.

So, on to the lower part of the piano where, as I suspected, all the loose detritus of my earlier work now lay.

This was harder to clean than the upper area, the vacuum cleaner got some of the dust and grit but I think a lot of it was magnetic in nature - wood magnetism, of course.  It took a soft brush and a lot of swiping and wiping and odd angles to get at some that stuff and knock it loose so the vacuum would pick it up.  No where near as nasty as the key bed, but a lot harder to clean.

The bottom of the piano was the easiest to clean - and held my highest hope for treasure.  No vacuum here - who knows what it might suck up by accident?  I went after this area with my soft brush and swept as much of the accumulated crap out onto the floor so I could visually check it out.

And was finally rewarded.

I knew it!  There HAD to be something hidden in a piano this old.  There just had to be...

Yep, that's right.  One S&H Green Trading Stamp.  My parents used to collect them when I was a kid, I remembered.  Might not be worth anything (if I remembered correctly from my youth, you needed hundreds to trade in for anything good - and that's when they still were tradeable), but I found it and it was my piano treasure.  It's getting framed and hung by the piano when this whole project is done.

So now my wife and I are the proud owners of one S&H Green Trading Stamp and a clean piano hulk.  Life doesn't get much better...