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New hammers glued and waiting to sand off the excess shank.

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Installing hammers and shank assemblies...using the old hammers as guides

New hammer shanks. To me, anything that was worn in the action such as the rollers, backchecks, any felt, etc., needed to be repalced. In my case the springs, and bushings were in great shape so I didn't replace the whippens/escapments/repitition levers.

New hammers as arrived from the piano supply company.

And the black keys....

Measuring/adjusting key travel.

Leveling the height of the keys. You stack various thicknesses of cardboard/paper punchings and measure the key over and over again, eighty-eight times. When you are satisfied with the height, you turn the whole stack over so that the felt rides against the bottom of the key. That's all new felt...

New back checks and damper lever felts. These are at the back of the keys in a grand.

The kit of punchings and felts one gets to level the keys. Also shown are the bushings for the tuning pins for the holes in the plate.

While the white keys were being rebuilt, the ebonies got refinished as well. Six coats of black lacquer with a final hand polishing.

New keytops and fronts. You can see the additional material added to the fronts to make the keys the proper size.

Slowly coming together:

Resizing 'en mass...I worked on the keys as if it were one piece of wood. The guy who recovered them in 1948 (you'll see that on one of the later pics), almost destroyed the keys. I had to add wood to the fronts and re-bush most of them. The one key has it's new tops clamped on while the glue sets.

Keys: I had to make a new key stop rail - the old one was busted in several places. It may be the right time to say that this piano had been worked on many times before and not properly. It was abused and had been antiqued white, painted black, and as customary when one owns a grand, the wax...

Pinblocks installed. I did take the precaution of putting a thin layer of epoxy on the sealed blocks to compensate for the slightest spaces between plate and block. The assembly of the blocks/plate have to support tons of tension. I didn't want them flying out of there....

New agraffs, paint, and hand lettering...

Retapping: