Post #21 - Time Is Of The Essence,,,

OK, I need to get these last two posts out of the way as quickly as possible - the goal is one post tonight and one more tomorrow.  You see...  I received the tuner kit on Friday (today is Sunday) and I've already been tinkering with what I received.  And, let me tell you, this is way more interesting - to me, anyway - that the strict refinishing stuff.

However - I am extremely proud, hopefully without being boastful, of how the exterior of this little project has turned out.  And, given the short forays into tuning that I've taken over the last two days (details to come), the exterior may be ALL that I have to be proud of.  That remains to be seen...

After the keys were as cleaned and refinished as I felt safe, the next part was the cover board that enclosed the upper part of the key action.  This is the panel that the candle holders (that in all likelihood were the deciding factor in actually buying this piano for both me and my wife) are attached to.  In the beginning, this is what we were looking at...

Now, you've already seen the cleaned up brass candle holders - just to remind you:

After cleaning up the brass, I could not do less for the wood...

The first task was to just clean it up.  I did not want to sand it down, the way I did to the top, and there were no big water stains on this section that would warrant that treatment.  So I gave it the usual light stripping with the wood cleaners, and then hit it the stains and wood enhancers.

Now, as you can see in the forefront of this picture, there is some fine etching that has been done to this board.  My original idea - I admit, because it was easier - was to stain this etching black and just continue refinishing the panel the way I had the rest of the piano.  So I got out the ebony stain I had used on the black keys and proceeded to swab it into the grooves...

 

 

Unfortunately - or fortunately, as the case may be - this didn't work out so well.  As you can see from the pictures above, the stain just kind of pooled around the grooves but never really penetrated them.  I kind of expected this - treated wood will repel stain - but I was hoping I would get lucky.  No such luck.

 

After a couple of unsuccessful tries, I wiped the stain away, and decided that I had to clean the grooves out so that the stain would find actual wood with which to bond and stay black.

 

I got out my awl and started to re-etch the groove etchings.  And that's where I found what I knew would be there - the grooves were originally gold.  Scrape away the crud and you get gold.  I knew it.

 

In the spirit of restoring what was original, at this point I abandoned any thought of the black way out of the etchings.  They had to be gold - it was the original plan (I inherently knew that going in, it goes with the manufacturer label, and it was what I wanted anyway), but the question was - how?  The original was most likely gold leaf (no chance in hell of that being part of the refinishing) and the etchings were extremely narrow and somewhat intricate.  I could spend weeks/months with a toothpick trying to fill these things in...

 

When in doubt...  Up to my beloved wife's artist studio to see what treasures I might find.  Now, granted, this is not a place I usually frequent - to be quite frank, it scares the crap out of me.  This room used to be my home office, once upon a time, but it is now Victoria's studio.  And she filled it with her dolls.

 

Ordinary dolls do not give me the heebie-jeebies, not even dozens and dozens of them staring at you while you rummage around looking for whatever supplies you need.  But this...   Well, let me give you a glimpse...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, seriously, how much time would YOU spend in this room.  Voluntarily??

 

So I got in, I found some gold touch-up paint, and I got the heck out of there...  And, as far as I could tell with the naked eye, not one of those dolls moved.  Then again, it WAS daylight.

 

Now, the question was - how do you get this paint, procured at the possible expense of sanity, into this tiny grooves without screwing up the rest of the woodwork?

 

 



 

 

I initially tried toothpicks.  That did not work...  So I headed back up into the Doll Zone (quickly) and found a paint brush with about 4 bristles - if you need an art supply of any type, Victoria probably has it...

 

That worked better, but it got paint outside the grooves, even with four bristles...  That's where I learned the additional benefits of very fine steel wool.  It took several tries to get the technique down correctly, but I found that if you were fairly careful - i.e. don't slop the paint all over the place - you can use the 4 bristle brush to get a large amount of paint into the groove, use a lint-free rag to distribute it, then let it dry.

 

Once dry, any paint outside the grooves can be lightly sanded off with the very fine steel wool.  Then just hit the panel with the cleaner and refinisher again to get the polish back...

 

You'll see the finished total product at the end of the next post, when we look at the entire exterior.  Let me just say that this process worked and it came out very well - and no dolls (or me) were killed or terrorized in the process.



Post #20 - Keys Redux

Post #9 and #13 were about the keys...  I've already spent a lot of time on them - but I have to say that I still wasn't satisfied.  I know that they will never be pearly white ivory again, and I seriously don't really want them to be, but they were still a little to stained or faded for my liking.

I decided to take one more (actually two) passes at them, to see if they could be improved.  To save you the hassle of checking out where we left off in post #13, here's a visual:

Way better than they were originally, but still...

So it was back to the steel wool, this time on the entire key assembly.  In the picture above, you can see the difference that cleaning the back part of the keys made - nice brown wood compared to ugly grey wood.  Unfortunately, I was about half way through the keys that first time before I realized that you could clean the back halves as well.

This time, I took a risk and went with a slightly coarser grade of steel wool, 0003, than I did the last time.  As a precaution, I did not spend a lot of time and effort on the ivory parts unless there was a particularly bad stain that I wanted to try to get rid off.

Once I went through the entire set with the 0003 wool, I got the finest steel wool I could find and started polishing and really making sure that edges and grooves were smoothed out.  For about a week, you could not walk through the living room because there was tarp and piano keys spread out in front of my chair.  The dogs lived in fear of knocking anything over - it happened once and then the entire area was given a wide berth,

Once I made two trips through the ivory keys, I was satisfied that I had gotten them to the best state I could without risking serious damage to the ivory.  There are still some stains (coffee, beer? who knows), but they are much reduced from where they were originally.

For the black keys, the ebony wood (if indeed it really is ebony wood) was looking faded.  I decided to stain the keys with an ebony stain - you could tell from looking at the sides of the keys that if they weren't originally stained someone previously had done so.  Hopefully, this will make them a deeper, richer black...

This whole process took the better part of three weeks - there are a bunch of keys and each got at least two passes.  My wife was very understanding, since these pieces were spread throughout the living room while they were being worked on.

Once they were done, the last part of the keys/keybed that needed to be addressed was the lock.  Like the wheels and the candle holders, I wanted all the bronze to glow. And the lock, although you couldn't see it all that much, did not.

First thing to do was get it out of the keybed without damaging the wood or the exterior veneer.

My friend Brasso had a wonderful effect on the bronze.  Unfortunately, for as determined as I am to document this, once again I dove into this part of the project without taking the "before" pictures.  So all I have are the "after" pictures, but in this case it's not that much of a loss.  There wasn't that much to see before...

Once the keys were back in place and the lock was gingerly put back into the slot, here is the result:

Of course, I have no key for the lock - but that's another story...

For those of you waiting breathlessly for the tuning part of this saga, the tuning kit has been ordered and should be here within the week.  I think there are two, maybe three, more posts to be made before I start on the tuning posts.

Post #19 - Long Time, No See

I have to apologize...  No posts for a long time - I don't make a very good blogger.

But, I haven't been idle either.  With some gentle prodding from my good wife, the piano is now is a fairly presentable state.  To be honest, if I had my way, I probably would have waited to finish all the outside stuff until I had finished all the inside stuff...  But, I finally came to the conclusion that the inside stuff was going to take waaaayyyy  longer rhan I probably had license to hope for.

So, as I said in my last post - several months ago - I started working on making the outside look good.  I'm about the pull the trigger on the kit to actually make it sound good on the inside (assuming that's even possible), so I figured it was time to bring anyone who still cared back up to speed.

So, first, just to refresh your memory - and mine - here's where we left off as of August 1, 2012...

Not exactly pretty.

The first two things I went after were the veneer cracks and missing pieces, and the top piece with the humongous water stain on the left side.  These were possibly the worst parts of the outside of the piano...

First, the missing veneer pieces had to be filled in.

And while that was setting and solidifying, I started work on the top.  To remind us both, this is what I started with...

Unfortunately, I didn't have the presence of mind to take pictures of the progress of getting rid of this lovely stain - once I get into it, I tend to lose track of everything else.  By the time I realized that I should have been taking pictures every step of the way, this is where I was at:

That is after a complete sanding of the entire board, a staining, and then another total sanding.  The light spot you see at the bottom of that picture, about 2/3 down, is all that remained of the water stain.

 

 

 

The last picture is what was left of the water stain after another sanding and another staining.  Hopefully, if you didn't know it was as bad as it was when I started, you would never know.

I cleaned and put the hardware back on  - Brasso is my new hero for all the hardware - and it ended up looking like this:

By the time all that was done, I was ready to go back to the veneer issues.  This one was a little harder - more putty (that wouldn't stay where I wanted it to), more stain, some kind of striping that made it look like wood grain, and a whole lot of sweat and worrying, but I think it turned out OK, at least to casual eye (that doesn't know what to look for)...

 

 

Next up - and it won't take two months - are the keys...  Stay tuned (lol, that part is still to be done).