Post #11 - "Standing At The Crossroads, Believe I'm Sinking Down"

This is where it starts to get squirrely.  Without actually refinishing the case and the exterior panels of  the piano, I have now done everything - cosmetically and hygenically - that I know I should do.  I stated - up front - that I wanted to make this into a working piano...  But what to do next?

I could, of course, concentrate on the cosmetic parts and defer all internal decisions for later.  In fact, logic and sanity rather dictate that that's the course I take.  Clean, fill, stain (if necessary), refinish, polish, whatever to get the exterior looking like a really great piece of furniture.

Now, that picture is a very similar piano, if not something identical - you can SEE the potential.  This is where, as I've stated in a previous post, my sanity is probably perceived as something more than it really is and grandiose ideas start to take over.  It's kind of sad, really...

So, rather than hauling all the parts I disassembled from this piano out to the garage when the weather was still temperate (for Houston, and - since we're still in catch-up mode, we're talking late April, early May when the temps are still in the mid-80's and the humidity is still below 90%) and started working on those, I started thinking about the internals.

Oh no, not the easy stuff - the stuff I've done before to some degree - not that.  Let's go for the stuff that totally commits you to a total rebuild.

Now, in the conscious part of my brain, that wasn't the rationale.  What I was thinking was more along the lines of... 

"Gee, those felts are terrible, you'll never be able to re-use them and you'll need to totally replace ALL of them to make this thing work."

And

"Gee, those keys are filthy, you would never want to use them - maybe not touch them - in their current condition."

However, in retrospect, I now believe that it was the SUBconscious part of my brain that was actually calling the shots:

"IF you replace those pads, then WHY would you want to replace the keys with an electronic keyboard substitute?"

And

"IF you clean those keys and get all the dirt off, leaving the lovely yellow patina,  then WHY would you EVER want to replace those keys with an electronic keyboard substitute?"

So, I now firmly believe, without ever realizing at the time what I was doing and what decisions I was potentially making, I hit a crossroad: 

Go left, finish the exterior and still leave yourself some options on the interior. 

Go right, start doing some relatively heavy lifting on the interior, endear yourself to it, get a stake in the ground there (so to speak), and start entrenching yourself into a total rebuild.

Of course, I chose right.  Not consciously - subconsciously.

In the course of the next two posts - the pads and the keys - I started doing real research into exactly what it would take to make this piano playable again.  And this is where I ran into the quagmire that delayed my posting about what I was doing in real time - along with my job, that sidetracked me from this project for a while.

So now we descend into my (in)sanity and - to some degree, my relative stupidity - and we take the right fork on the crossroad.  The interesting part is that it's not a done deal when we get to the end of that fork, it turns out that there's a potential u-turn back.  But, speaking from the present day, I'm not sure I want to take it - and I need some advice.

But first, we'll sink into the depths of ignorance, felts, and keys...