A Piano Desk Finale (part 3)

Part 1: The Piano Desk Project
Part 2: A Day from Hell

Well it was roughly a week's worth of work on and off and a couple of things changed but generally speaking I've reached a final product. One aspect I scrapped was doing a drawer under the desktop, the reasoning behind that is, the materials that were left after I had used the good pieces were mostly chipboard that had been laminated with nice stuff on the outside, if I were to cut into it, I'd have rough edges that I'd then have to laminate and I just didn't want the extra time and expense. In the future I may still add one, I'll have to see once I start using it as a desk if I need the extra storage. When last we met I had just declared victory over the cast iron piano harp after spending about a day and a half trying to remove it. That was tough boring work. After that I moved on to easy boring work, removing the finish from the piano. Now I didn't REALLY have to do this because it looked alright from the start but it had marks from paint on it, things carved in, and various other blemishes I wanted to get rid of. I also wasn't a huge fan of the color, so I started to sand pieces down. I used a combination of hand sanding, power sanding and stain/varnish stripper to remove everything.

A warning about the stripper, when I worked in paint we always warned people that unless you get the orange goopy "safer" stripper, it can be pretty caustic and you should wear gloves. I got a ton of the heaviest duty stuff on my hands and arms without even a tingle or burn. So I don't know if I'm just desensitized from years of working with chemicals or if it's a symptom of the over safe-ification of the country. In either case, having gloves couldn't hurt.
The varnish softens and scrapes off looking kind of like used oil or in some cases shed snake skin. it's nasty, having something to scrape it out on is important.

Here's everything sanded down. It looks like the legs had a little more do to but that was what it looked like. Now in this picture you can see the back panel, its clearly lighter in some places and still a little yellow in others. The yellowed sections still have a clearcoat sealing it in. I decided I didn't care enough to take it off and get that intricate so I gave the whole back panel a quick rough power sand and I'll show you why later. From here on out it's easy going you just need some patience. At this point you should pick a color of stain you want. I went with Jacobean since I wanted something really dark. I was really hoping for an almost black chocolate brown, but the water based mixed by the paint desk was really dissapointing. I'll stick with oil based stains thanks.

Like I said, just stain away, you can brush it on, you can rub it on with a rag, you can use a foam brush. Let it sit for 10-15 minutes (the longer it sits, the darker it ends up because more stain can soak in). I took the desktop off to get into the sides and back more easily. Here you can see what I was talking about. The back ended up with a great rustic look, you can see scratches from the sanding giving it a great texture and the areas that are more heavily sanded and varnish free soaked in the stain better. Again, partially to save time and because I really liked the sort of raw look this had, I didn't varnish this piece because it looked great as is.

Here you can really start to see the difference in color on the areas that got a heavy sanding (the top and sides) they took it much better and have a deeper reddish color to them. I think I only did one coat of stain on everything, but if you get done staining something and don't think it's dark enough, let it sit for 24 hours and go over it again. You can see the pedals here. I left them just because they are a nice look, they don't depress anymore since they aren't in tension anymore, but its a nice reminder of where the desk started. After this step I reattached the desktop and I was all set to varnish. I chose to go with a gloss finish because A: I like shiny the best and thought it would be reminiscent of the upscale glossy shiny grand piano type look and I thought it would be a nice contrast with the unfinished sections. And B: because gloss is the purest varnish. Essentially what happens with semi gloss and satin is that as you work towards a lesser sheen they actually add in material to dull it. So it's like adding milk to water until it becomes opaque. This extra material can actually cloud up later in the pieces life and dull the finish sooner and I don't like that. Also gloss is ends up the thickest, most durable surface.

Here we are before varnish. The top is still on hinges and flips open if for some reason I wanted it to. What I did with the old keyboard cover is use it for the middle shelf. I wanted to preserve a piece completely original, it just got a clearcoat so the sheens match up. It's still the original color and still has the logo painted on the front. The flat desk surface ended up a little like the back panel in that I didn't get it all sanded down perfectly but up close the color variation it has is gorgeous. I also cut a bottom shelf to sit above the pedals where you can see bare wood in this picture. I used the panel that was vertical in that position blocking off your view inside the piano and since it matched nicely on it's own, after I cut it I was done.

That leads us to today. This is after 2 or 3 coats of varnish. The key to a nice surface is twofold. First BRUSH it on. Don't use the cheap foam brushes and don't use cheap chip brushes, buy a nice natural hair varnish brush. It makes for a better application and it won't shed junk hairs onto it that you'll have to pick out. The foam brushes add too much in the way of bubbles that it's not worth it. The second part is, after every coat sand it lightly to take out all air bubbles that form. each coat after that will be smoother. What I tend to do is finish one surface and move onto the next, once I'm done with the next I go back to the first one I did and brush it all again lightly. That gives it time for the air bubbles to rise to the surface and then a light drag across the top after it's sat for five minutes breaks the bubbles and smooths the whole thing. Then let it sit. Ideally you'll need at least 3 hours, I like to let a coat dry for a whole day. It will depend on humidity and where you're doing it. As a rule let it sit for 3 or 4 hours and then you can touch it to see if it's tacky or if it's ready for another coat. I also say you need at least 2 or 3 coats. That's where you start to really get the best coverage and the smoothest surface. Sometimes the shine doesn't really show up till the second coat, then the third is what give it the nice glow.

 There's the original registration plaque that had been on the back of the piano. I left the outer frames for the keys in place because they looked nice and this seemed to fit just about perfect here so now it's on the front and you get to see the information about it. The picture below it is the keyboard cover shelf, with the Chickering logo that was so nice I just left it all. It's attached with a couple of L brackets into the bottom of it, that are screwed into the back and then then ends of it are supported by two pieces of wood so it's nice and solid.

And there you have it. A week long project refinishing a piano and giving it a new life as a desk rather. Saving it from the junk pile. Sometime next year when the innards get used in our art classes I'll post and show what the rest of it turned into and maybe even a picture once it's buried under my paperwork and living in it's new home on campus.

Piano Desk Project (Part 2 Day from Hell)

Part 1: Piano Desk Project Part 1
Part 3: The Finale

Another day down, very little accomplished. With how fast the first days worth of work went I had high hope for finishing up the breakdown quickly today. That was not the case. After 6 hours of work I finally had my one major goal for the day accomplished. With some research my knowledge of piano innards has probably tripled, I still don't know enough to speed up removing a harp. For those who were in my boat here's an explanation. I've found that (generally speaking) the cast iron piece of a piano with the strings attached is referred to as a harp, because essentially that's what it is. If you could tune it and keep it in one piece, outside of the piano you could set it up and sort of play it. Dates back to harpsichord days. Once you remove it all and take the strings off it's usually considered a "plate". Also, being cast iron... it's pretty darn heavy. This one I'm guessing was somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds.

So the first few hours were slow going, I was trying to figure out how it was all attached. Finally I got it laid onto it's back with the desk removed and had access to lift it straight out once I had it loose. There were about 30 giant lag screws and I removed all of them and it still wouldn't budge. I had been trying to keep all the strings intact if I could but that didn't happen, which ended up making this the more dangerous day. I had snipped a couple of strings in this picture to access the covered screws but it was still solidly attached. It was around now that I decided to try to loosen one of the tuning pins to see if I could just take the strings off without cutting it. That's when I realized they were almost 3 inches long and went into the wood, serving as screws to hold it all on. There were about 300 of them. The danger here is that now I knew I had to snip all the strings, some of them were under pretty serious tension, so if I didn't put anything on top to dampen the snap they would shoot about 30 feet out the shop door or until they hit something. Safety first here.

Now I started to remove the pins one at a time, but they are square headed so I had to use vise grips and spin one at a time. I did about 15 of those and thought "there has to be a better way" I sat and thought for awhile, I had already tried sockets, but they didn't fit because it was square. Then I had the idea to turn it upside down because a ratchet is square, and it fit! But I still didn't have a way to turn it any better. Then I had the bright idea that I could reverse a bit in the drill so it would fit the socket end, and magic, now I had a powered way to remove the pins. Thought it still took about an hour.







Here you've got square peg, square hole.

And here you have round peg round hole?

I just matched up the right size socket and put it in a a corded drill (if you're actually doing this you need the extra power)

About an hour later I finally had everything removed and the harp free. Then I could just lift it out, which was awkward because of the shape and weight, but not too bad compared to how tiring the rest of the day was. If it weren't so heavy it would be a great piece of something. I'll ask Nancy if she wants it for her class to use, but it's so heavy you can't have it stand up on it's own, can't hang it on a wall, can't do anything much with it except sit it on the ground and be glad you don't have to take out another one. With that out I decided to call it a day and stop working since technically the breakdown is done now. Anything else that get's removed will be because I want to change the shape or put in shelves or do something along those lines.

Here it is, standing back up, with the desk back in. The "lid" to it, the top piece on hinges actually fits pretty nice still and makes a good top shelf. I'm not sure what to do about the back still. I kind of life the curved soundboard pieces that are left over, and the curved holes from the tuning pins, but I may open all of that up to expose the support beams on the back and have it open completely



I like the look of the supports from the back and think that seeing those open from the front would look really nice. Pros and cons of that are:

A: it would lighten the whole thing even more which is good and
B: I think it would look nice

BUT:
I'd lose the curved pieces.... though I'm not entirely sure that bothers me. The bottom is the cracked one that started this whole project and I cracked the top right corner of the curve trying to pry the harp up.

Something to think about. I'm also leaning towards stripping it all down and staining it an almost black brown, that would let just a show the wood grain on it, the downside of that is I'd lose the fancy script name, but I'm not sure how I'll be using that piece anyway. I'll give it some thought while I start to lay out the actual desk tomorrow.