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.