In this picture you can see some of the blue chalk I used to make sure there were no high/low spots in the wood where it fits against the iron plate. You have to set it in there see where it "wobbles", grind down the opposite area etc., to get it to lay flat.
Plate prep: Whoever had rebuilt this piano the first time did a crummy job. I don't think there was any two groups of strings that were level throughout the scale. These agraffs were all loose, broken, and two were glued in. Chickering being who they were made these themselves and this was before SAE standards. I could have gotten some replacements, but they didn't match the majority - so, I drilled them all out and installed new ones. Now the entire scale (strings) are uniform from bass to highest treble. This is in terms of distance from keybed to strings.
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....
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 (and some flames) from the dripping candelabras leaked inside all over the action. When I think about it, perhaps this is one piano not worth rebuilding....but I got it for free (sorta)...
I also had to repair a few of the keys in addition to recovering them.
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.
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 in the background too. Felt hardens over time, and when a key is released it can make an audible "clunk" against the hardened felt.
