The first thing to tackle were the back casters - these were not bronze, like the front ones, but plain cast iron heavy-duty casters. And they were doing a heck of a job on our floor, they had to go.
So, off to Lowes to find the closest match in size and shape to the ones I had pulled off. Found them, but the holes weren't a match - no big deal I have a drill.
I put them on in the same places the old ones came off and they seemed stable. However, I wasn't really happy with this new configuration - experience with the front legs and casters told me that I wanted as much of the weight of the piano off of them as possible, especially since the wheels are still bronze and not exactly smooth to the touch.
So, the next day I was back at Lowes buying to more caster for the body. I knew that anything ugly was not going to pass muster with my wife, but I thought that I might be able to strategically place these in the front the piano case and they would still be reasonably out of sight.
That takes care of the easy part. Now the legs themselves...
Like everything else on this piano, the legs were in pieces and not held together by any hardware (other than the casters at the bottom). They're essentially a big wooden peg at top and bottom, with the shank of the leg in the middle; the top of peg is a large screw that holds all the lathed components and screws into the bottom of the key bed.
First thing on my mind after taking them all apart was how to keep them from falling out of the key bed any time the piano was shifted. Both of the wooden screws were fairly well stripped at the tip and even if they had been in better condition, the holes that they screwed into were a disaster.
Enter the two-headed screw. A quick drilling to the top of the peg and I seated a two-headed screw into the top of each peg. After carefully threading the leg back into the hole, I created an indentation as a guide for drilling the matching hole into the key bed base. This had to be carefully done, or I would have drilled through the key cheeks on either side of the key board.
With that, hopefully, resolved and out of the way, the next thing on my mind was the condition of the leg and it's components. Dirty and dull.
This is where Liquid Gold Wood Cleaner came to the rescue. This stuff worked great (I had never used it before but after I saw how it cleaned up the legs, I was going around the house using it on a bunch of our antique furniture pieces).
Once cleaned, I used a rub-on polyurethane to bring a shine back to the wood.
And then, finally, the last step was to put the legs back together and put them back into the piano. I was still a little worried about the double-headed screw trick, but it worked great on the left side and fairly well on the right. The difference was that the top of each leg has a square block of finished wood. On the left, the threads had been totally stripped and someone before me had screwed it directly to the key bed. On the right, the threads were still pretty good and the block came off with the leg. Screwing the left side in was easy because that block was fixed and I could go as tight as I could. On the right, you had to match the front of the block correctly so it faced the right way - and that made it harder to get it in as tightly as the left.
But in the end, it all worked out and both legs were back in place. Then came the heavy lifting - literally. I got the piano back upright and all wheels were holding nicely.
Here's the before picture - all I really have is a close-up of the caster, but you'll get the idea.
And here are the after pictures. If you look hard you can see the difference between the leg and the paino case wood (disregard the filler - haven't gotten to THAT yet).
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