Post #9 - The Keys, Part 1

Well, after I finished the last post and went to bed, I realized that i had glossed over a significant portion of the dismemberment.  While I fully intended to carry on with details about The Cleaning, I decided I needed to take a half-step backward and talk a little bit about The Keys.

Now, all in all, these keys are in pretty good shape - several have chips missing from their edges but if you were in excess of 125 years old, you probably would as well.  None are missing, none are missing any type of part, and - with the exception of two - none of them stick.

But they are filthy.  The picture doesn't do them justice.

As I mentioned earlier, getting them out was fairly easy.  Unlike some other keys I've dealt with, these are not directly attached to the action.  Lifting them out carefully, paying attention the back of the keys, and it was a rather easy task...

The keys are ivory, the white ones at least, and the black ones are presumably ebony (I wouldn't know exactly what ebony looks like, but all my research says that they must be) - Stevie Wonder would be proud.

Now, I say the whites are ivory, but again I'm no expert.  However, they fit the description and I can definitely say they are not plastic.  The key cover is in two pieces, which is standard for ivory keys - you can see the seam in the picture above.  They have a great yellow patina - once you get below the layer of grime.

What was more interesting was what was under the keys once I got them all off.  The pads were in terrible shape, mismatched, and in some cases totally missing...

The long felt (possibly horsehair for one them?) strips at the back of the keys was almost totally disintegrated and came out in pieces - where there were actually pieces still there.

Because, at this point, I didn't know exactly what my intentions were and where I was going with this, I decided that I needed to keep the keys and the pads together - just in case.

So I lined up the keys across the top of the piano lid in order and then carefully removed the various pads and felts with or across the keys as I found them in the key bed.

Now, besides the general yucky condition of pads (I was wishing I had gloves), you might notice that while a lot of them are similar, there are definitely different colors, sizes, widths, and shapes.  And, although you can't really see them in the picture, some of the keys didn't have felts at all in places - there were little circlets of paper as well.

And this is when it started to dawn on me that I was probably not the first person who had tried to restore this piano - or at least fix it up.  I knew it had been tuned - it was signed - but this implies that someone had done more extensive work on it.  Given the general interior condition of piano, it certainly wasn't any time in the recent past.  When you consider how well the piano (and I'm not talking about the pegs, peg board, or harp here) has held up against its age, it seems a fairly safe assumption that some kind of work has been done on it.  I don't know if that's good or bad at this point, but I'm hoping good.

OK, so now the keys and all their related pads, felts, etc have been removed and set aside keeping them all together - just in case I need to keep them that way for a reason I don't know about.  Next comes the interior cleaning.