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.
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