Stringing along with you!

Sometimes it's possible to set yourself too much of a target for one day's work. Today was one of those days.

I popped across to Omega Music to borrow my mate Jerry's piano tuning gear that he'd got his wife Jo, to take to work (she works there) at about lunchtime and had a good natter to her. The first natter I've had in best part of a fortnight seeing as I've had a fantastically bad chest infection for about three weeks. At last I'm able to talk to someone without coughing all over them and then showing the colour of the inside of my lungs. Anyway, you didn't open this blog to read about that did you?!?

The idea was that I'd lower the string tension on the piano (that's what you're supposed to do) and eventually start to remove the strings. Getting the tension down was relatively easy - take your time and do the treble strings (unison first, then left then right) but you've got to do it evenly throughout the piano keyboard, gradually lowering the stresses on the frame. As Martin said "What happens if you do it wrong; does the piano fold in half?" Enough of his helpful comments methinks! Lol! But do you know what took an absolute age? Removing the tuning pins and getting rid of the treble wire. Of course, I want the bass strings to be remade so will be sending those off to be copied so they were all carefully(ish) removed, threaded onto wire via the eye loop at the bottom end and they'll be packed into a nice big box to the string maker who'll do a good quality replacement for them. It really does take ages. I counted somewhere in the region of 243 individual pins (give or take one or two) all of which I unscrewed by hand courtesy of Jerry's tuning levers. It took pretty much a full day's work. I started at about 1pm and came in again at 8pm. Yeah, you know me by now, I do tend to faff a bit and get a little sidetracked by things like the neighbour's cat, Lucy, coming and saying hello. She spent about half an hour sitting on my shoulder while I was working. I always wanted a parrot but I'd had an African Grey in mind not a tortoiseshell! Then before all of the unwinding I needed a micrometer to measure the gauge of the strings I was removing so that I ordered the correct gauge pinao wire to re-string. I collared another neighbour, Jim, and asked if I could borrow his. It just happened to be out on the kitchen worktop when I asked so did my calculations and gave him it back within about 30 minutes.

The day wore on and the arms, shoulders and back were killing me with the constant unwinding motion. I wanted to stop but knew if I did that I'd still have it to do later so ploughed on. Eventually it was finished. What else to do but tidy up! The picture to the left is the piano with all of the strings removed and the side with the finish removed which I did last night. Funnily enough, the sanding part took very little time indeed but I've got to admit that despite it being done by hand I didn't do a very good job as yet as I've got two more sandings to do on that side alone. The grade should get finer after each sanding but at least you get the idea of how it is starting to look.