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).