Best Day So Far.

By the title of this entry you can probably guess that I'm feeling very pleased with myself.

For a few weeks now I've been looking at the piano and trying to work out how to remove the pin block. For those who don't know, the pin block is the plank of laminated wood that stretches from the left to the right of the piano. It sits under the metal plate and its job is to take the tuning pins. The tuning pins are hammered into it then are turned slightly every time it is tuned. The pin block does deteriorate after time mainly due to age, temperature changes and of course the huge amount of pressure it is under from all of the tension from the strings. This pin block was shot so it had to come out. However, I didn't really know how to do it. I searched and searched the internet for advice and couldn't find anything. I looked in one of the four books I've got on piano restoration and they all said in that particular chapter "first, remove the pin block. After that you need to make another one" with no hint on how to remove it!!! So, I had all of the screws removed by Steve as I mentioned in an earlier post. After that I couldn't really make any headway. I tried to jemmy it out. It didn't budge. After weeks of procrastinating I eventually bit the bullet today. I went off to Homebase and bought a dead cheap set of chisels. Got them home, got the thickest and heaviest one out of the packet and started thwacking against the glue joints. Almost immediately it started to look promising. After a few seconds of belting it (that's the professional term) I heard a huge crack. Don't worry, it was what I wanted to hear. I looked down and the glue joint has come away! HURRAY! The front rail was moving forward and cracked the veneer but I expected that and was planning on replacing the veneer anyway. Cutting a long story short I got it out! It was a big big job but well worth taking the time to ensure it was done correctly.

I've also completed another task that took a LOT longer that I'd ever think was imagineable. The soundboard needed to have the varnish removed. I'd say it took me best part of 20 hours to do it! It's such a slow process. However, the soundboard looks fantastic now. Have a look at the picture to see for yourself.

Once all the finish was removed from the soundboard I then started to remove the bridge pins. I totted up that there's 480 of them on this piano. Each one of them is very tightly wedged into the bridge so that the string can go between them and thus increase pressure. Trying to remove them is a job in itself as they're at an offset angle. They don't just go straight in you know. One one side they point a little towards you and on the other side they point a little away from you. Trying to get a decent purchase while pulling on them is very hard and you're more than aware that you could damage the bridge or the soundboard. I'll be replacing all of the pins with new ones after I've given the top of the bridge a little tittivation to smarten it up.

Some terrible news coming up... Well, it's not actually, I think it's pretty funny.

Since we put our house on the market in June last year, my other grand piano has been in storage courtesy of my friends at Omega Music which is on the trading estate just around the corner from us. Of course, we all thought that the house would be on the market for 10 minutes and the piano could go to wherever we moved to. As soon as the for sale board went up the property market collapsed. So, as a consequence, my other piano has languished courtesy of the local piano dealer, in a storage depot for 10 months. Well, they rang me the other day. "Hi Stuart, we're giving up the storage facility. Where shall we bring your piano back to?" The phrase "BUGGER!" came to my lips. So, after a lot of argy-bargy I've made room in the garage for the other piano to come back on Wednesday. You'd think our garage is a tardis wouldn't you? I'll have 15ft worth of grand pianos in there! I'll leave the current piano on its legs and the other one will stay on its side as I'll not be working on that one anyway. You may ask why we took it out of the house to start with? Well, our living room is only 12' square and a 6' grand piano in it did rather dominate so we thought it'd be wiser to remove it to make the place seem a little roomier. I've got to say that it's lovely without the piano in here as space is something we're not really used to. Martin did have a habit of saying "Give me a tune" for a few weeks after the piano had been taken away as he knew how much I was missing it. Of course, he got a slap.

At this point I'd like to report some bullying. It's not something I'd like to put into the public domain but what the hell. I've got a friend called Ellen S. She's a retired teacher from Norway and she's been picking on me. Tell 'er, mam! Actually I'm thrilled that someone other than me looks at this thing. You do wonder sometimes don't you?