Ed Morgano
11-05-2010, 9:38 PM
High School Physics Project
I built this piano as my senior physics project in the 1958-1959 school year. It has kicked around several attics in a cardboard box for the past 50 years. Now that I’m retired and had the time, I decided to try to get all of the pieces back together as best I could. The amazing thing to me is that at age 16/17 I was able to build this in my dad’s basement with the tools he had which consisted of a tablesaw. He also had a couple of coping saws, sand paper, a few hand planes etc. What he didn’t have was a wood lathe, RAS, jointer, table router, thickness planner, CNC router, drum sander, band saw or drill press.
All of the joints on the piano were made with League Pages Hide glue and through the years of storage the piano deteriorated. When I finally got to it, several pieces were missing. I’ve tried to restore it to a certain level. The entire piano action was missing. All I had left were 3 black keys and one white key with the ivory missing. I have no clue what the action looked like or how it was constructed so I couldn’t “restore” it. While I could have made a new one, it didn’t seem to me like that would have been representative of my original work. Instead, I made the missing keys but left them unfinished and I left the action out completely but set the hammers up with a separate display. My piano teacher also tuned and restored pianos so he provided me with the felt covered hammers, piano wire, tuning pins, the small polished pins that hold the strings and ivory for the keys. Thanks for looking.
166422166423166424166425166426166427
Close to Being Finished ........................ This is what I started with.
I built this piano as my senior physics project in the 1958-1959 school year. It has kicked around several attics in a cardboard box for the past 50 years. Now that I’m retired and had the time, I decided to try to get all of the pieces back together as best I could. The amazing thing to me is that at age 16/17 I was able to build this in my dad’s basement with the tools he had which consisted of a tablesaw. He also had a couple of coping saws, sand paper, a few hand planes etc. What he didn’t have was a wood lathe, RAS, jointer, table router, thickness planner, CNC router, drum sander, band saw or drill press.
All of the joints on the piano were made with League Pages Hide glue and through the years of storage the piano deteriorated. When I finally got to it, several pieces were missing. I’ve tried to restore it to a certain level. The entire piano action was missing. All I had left were 3 black keys and one white key with the ivory missing. I have no clue what the action looked like or how it was constructed so I couldn’t “restore” it. While I could have made a new one, it didn’t seem to me like that would have been representative of my original work. Instead, I made the missing keys but left them unfinished and I left the action out completely but set the hammers up with a separate display. My piano teacher also tuned and restored pianos so he provided me with the felt covered hammers, piano wire, tuning pins, the small polished pins that hold the strings and ivory for the keys. Thanks for looking.
166422166423166424166425166426166427
Close to Being Finished ........................ This is what I started with.