Restoration of a Knabe Victorian Grand and its transformation to a Pianomation player piano for Don Hollingshead
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37) After soaking the leather off these back checks, I
discovered that the felt was also no good. It had been impregnated with foreign
substances and become hard as a brick. Therefore, I soaked the under felts off as
well. Now I am preparing to glue new underfelts into place. Since replacement
back checks have many problems, I prefer to use the original wires and wooden heads if
possible. Placing new wires into the keys is often a problem because the new wires
often don't hold as tightly as the originals. The heads of these back checks are
much longer than what is available through replacements as well, so I'm refelting and
releathering the originals.
38) Now the under felts are in place and new buck skin is being stretched over the
back checks. This arrangement of felt and leather makes for the perfect
"landing platform" specifically designed to catch the hammers after a hard blow
and prevent them from falling back too far from the string until the pianist lets go of
the key.
39) The keysticks on this piano had really been subjected to lots of problems.
One big, obvious fault as a result of the years of abuse was the color of the wood.
They were a dark color which was totally ugly. To improve this look, the keys
were given a light bleaching with 30% lab grade hydrogen peroxide mixed with a solution of
sodium hydroxide. This vastly improved the color of the wood. Also, the sides
of the keys had the finger dirt removed from them with a simple alcohol wash using steel
wool and a cotton cloth. I used to sand this off but this causes the key to be
deformed. I have learned that the alcohol is all we need to bring back the nice
clean appearance of the wood. Since this piano is to become a Pianomation player
piano, I had to alter the keyframe to accommodate the mechanism. The back edge of
the frame had to be band sawn away so that the backs of the keys are exposed. All
the old felt had already been removed from the keyframe and the keypins have all been
polished. The keypins on a piano like this are brass which is nickel plated.
In the case of this piano, the nickel plating has worn off. However, the brass
cleaned up smooth and shiny. Since this is to be a Pianomation system, I feel
confident that the keys will get sufficient use to keep the pins polished. If I
thought this piano might sit for years at a time unused, I'd be inclined to replace the
keypins with new ones. However, it is very hard on action frames that are this old
to put in new key pins. The old pins are in very tightly and the wood gets slightly
damaged during extraction. Then the new pins don't want to fit into place as tightly
as the originals. I think it far better to keep the original pins in this situation.
Now the new key felt is being installed onto the frame. The first action is
to coat the back rail with hide glue and lay in one thin layer of red felt and then a
thicker layer of dense green felt over that. The red felt creates a barrier which
keeps the center of the green felt from being glued down. With only the edges of
this felt being glued down, the felt will tend to remain much more stable. The key
level will remain more consistent and the weight of the keys will not tend to compact the
felt nearly as much as on pianos whose felt is glued down all the way.
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40) Since there is only a slim edge of the green felt which
is being glued down, clamps must be installed over the felt layers in order to ensure a
good bond that will never work loose. Slips of glass are used as clamping cauls.
41) The next day, the clamps were removed and the back rail felt ironed to remove
all marks left behind by the cauls. Then new center rail punchings (white circles of
felt) which had been laid up in a clamping press to precompress them/stabilize them are
now in place as are new front punchings. These punchings were special ordered even
though I had punchings in stock that would have worked. I have come to prefer to use
the widest and densest front rail punchings that I can get my hands on. The larger
the front green punching is and the more dense it is, the firmer the action feels.
When the key is depressed, it hits that felt and stops very solidly without any hint of
sound.
42) The keys have been placed back on the action frame for storage until it is time
for the next batch of action work. You can see in this photo how the back undersides
of the keys were cleaned up and felt cloth (brown) glued to them. This cloth is 1
1/4" wide to accommodate the design of the activator solenoids of the Pianomation
system.
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45) 
43) Now we come to one of the biggest challenges of this
project. The original lid was broken as is common among Knabe pianos. In
addition, the veneer is coming loose in many areas. The original lid is just too
badly damaged to be reused. I special ordered in new South American Rosewood veneer
for the job of making a new lid. The reason Knabe lids break has to do with poor
planning on their part. Knabe used a three ply veneer which has the center layer
running the opposite direction of the outer two layers. This was great for
stabilizing the veneer and preventing expansion and contraction to a certain degree.
However, the strength of this veneer runs along the outer two layers. In the
case of this lid, the veneer is strongest with the grain or across the lid. Yet this
is the same direction that the boards which make up the inner layer of the lid run as
well. This means that the veneer did not help to reinforce and strengthen the butt
joints between each of the boards by passing across them at a 90 degree angle. When
the lids are stressed, the one inner layer of veneer is too thin to do the job of
preventing the lid from breaking. Knabe lids are very frequently broken for this
reason. If this piano were to be in black or if the veneer was not also badly
damaged, it might be possible to glue the broken halves of the lid back together in the
same manner used on the 9' Knabe grand shown elsewhere on this web site. (click here for the page containing the lid
repair to that piano) However, this is impossible due to the extent of the
damage and the customer's desire to keep the Rosewood visible.
44) There are many different species of Rosewood in the world. It was my
opinion that the wood used to make this piano was acquired from Brazil. Brazilian
Rosewood is now embargoed. Sadly enough, Brazilians can still cut these trees down
to make room for farm land and burn the trees but they can't export them. For this
reason, we go to nearby countries who have Rosewood trees that are closely related to this
species and which have similar visual characteristics. The trouble we are running
into has to do with our time in history. When this Knabe was built, there were huge,
ancient Rosewood trees in the forests of Brazil which have now all been cut down. If
you look at the lid of this piano in photo #43, you will see that the pattern in the grain
repeats only once across the lid. In this photo of a sheet of veneer which I
acquired directly from South America at great expense you can see that the grain pattern
repeats fairly frequently. The result is a wood grain which is more dramatic and
even more beautiful than the original. However, the tree which generated the wood
for this Knabe was so huge that it had a lot of straight grain showing in the area the
veneer was taken. Although I still feel that this is Brazilian Rosewood and that we
are replacing it with a species which is as close as possible to the original, the grain
pattern looks closer to what we are now getting from supplies in the east. Indian
Rosewood has a much straighter, almost boring, grain figure. It is likely that a
closer match to this lid could have been gotten by using Indian Rosewood. At this
point, the issue is in the hands of the owner to decide whether to get a closer match to
the grain even if it means going outside the species or to go for it and use this South
American supply which has such a beautiful pattern. If we do use this veneer, the
other areas on the piano which also need reveneering will pull the grain into other areas
causing the effect to blend better. Also, it will be best if we reorient the grain
of the veneer 90 degrees from the original design in order to reduce the number of times
the pattern repeats across any one surface. This will break up the pattern a bit and
make it look better.
45) I'm sorry for the fuzzy focus on some of the pictures shown in today's updates.
I was having some camera troubles which are now sorted out. This photo and
the next are a continuation of the process started in pictures #6 and #7 on page one.
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46) I thought all along that I may have to reveneer this
entire board after doing the mechanical repairs. However, before going to that
extreme, I decided to attempt to do it another way. The veneer of this fall board is
very beautiful and I don't think that replacing it with new material would be an
improvement. In addition, the curves of this board are very tough to veneer
properly. At the factory, they had special cauls that made the job easy. In my
shop, the job is nearly impossible to do well.
47) The first step was to plane away the bulk of the excess material that was in the
replacement piece. After this, a curved scraper was used to meticulously shape the
contour of the insert so that it matched the flow of the rest of the fall board exactly.
48) This shows the next step. The stain that I am going to use to get all the
various pieces of the piano to match had to be made. No stain I had from a supplier
would suffice. Rosewood is a very special material and this Rosewood in particular
had features of color which made it very hard to get a dye that worked with the wood.
Several initial attempts were too red or too brown. The browns made the wood
look dark and muddy. The reds made the wood look like the dye was literally clashing
with it. Finally, I managed to find the right compromise by starting with a red dye
diluted by half and then altered by adding a purple wine color and a bit of a greenish
brown. The finished color works so well with the wood that an inexperienced eye
would suspect the wood had never been stained at all but had been finished with its
natural raw color. It is a rich, beautiful, opulent color. I was very
impressed, if I do say so myself, with the finished color. Because this unit
combines original Rosewood veneer with many boards which are not Rosewood but have been
faux painted right from the factory to look like Rosewood and also because I have to match
in new Rosewood, it became absolutely critical to find a color of dye which would bring
all those different components together into a single unit which worked well. I
doubt that any other coloring I could have chosen would have worked so well on this piano.
However, that was just the beginning. This board had an insert of white wood which needed to be made to match the rosewood veneer. First the entire board was sprayed with the new dye. Then a browner dye was hand painted onto the center piece to match it with the rest of the board. Next, the board was sealed with shellac. Then the grain of the Rosewood was hand painted onto the center so that the finished board now looks as if it was never broken and pieced. Finally, the painted grain was sealed into place and the pores filled with a brown toned wood filler. The final step is to seal the wood one last time to bind in the filler and the piece will be ready to lacquer. In addition to these repairs, some of the Rosewood veneer had to be removed from one end on the corner because the glue had died and a regluing attempt had failed to lock it back into place. The missing veneer was replaced by a technique called burning in and then grain was painted over the repair to hide it. At the end of a long day of concentrating on just this one board, I had to admit that I couldn't tell where it had been repaired any longer. A true success and a happy start to the many wood repairs this piano is going to require.
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49) Knabe has a bad design for almost all their music racks.
The guide rails on the sides of the piano are shaped differently than is standard
and the wood at the edges of the music rack is machined to accommodate it. This
leaves the edges of the music rack too insubstantial to hold up to any sort of heavy use.
I almost always change out this design to a more standard one to prevent the damage
these racks come in with. This rack is no different. It has been broken in
half on one side and badly glued back together. This joint had to be broken again
and reglued in better alignment. I will be converting this rack to a modern shape
and replacing the guide rails with a more successful style.
50) Here, you see the broken rack being glued together. The rack is made of a
core of mahogany and veneered in a plain white wood species of no particular interest.
Then fake Rosewood grain was painted over this veneer. Cheaters! In
addition, the grain direction of the veneer is the same as the core wood. The
mahogany is too light and soft to serve well at the riding point with the guide rail.
It does make for a nice light rack to move in and out. However, it really
needs the veneer to be glued on in the opposite direction of grain to lend it additional
strength.
51) The original veneer has been planed off the top and the surface scraped and made
ready for new veneer. I will be using the costly South American Rosewood that will
also be used on the lid. This veneer will be laid in the opposite direction as the
original to give the rack more strength. Before this veneering is done, however,
much of the core of the piece will be removed and replaced with stronger multi-laminated
hardwood to give the surface that runs on the guide rails more strength. Inserts of
this wood will also be laid into the centers across the grain to prevent any future chance
of another similar break like the one I just fixed.
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52) The underside of the music rack will only get new veneer
at the ends. The veneer was carefully sawn at the joint between the connecting rails
and the ends and then the veneer of the ends was planed off.
53) Using a guide rail clamped to each end of the music desk, a strip of wood was
removed with the router. The remaining wood to the outside of the line cut out with
the router was removed using a hand plane. This photo shows the result of that work.
The clamp you see is there because another week area in the wood was found. I
twisted the wood to force the stress cracks open and then packed them with glue. The
clamp was placed on the wood and the extra glue squeezed out and cleaned away. When
dry, the glued area will actually be stronger than the rest of the wood which wasn't
glued.
54) Matching pieces of hardwood pin block material which is made from
multi-laminated material called Delignit were made to fit the areas which had been
excised. The thickness of these pieces were made to match the rabbits cut in the
music desk exactly. The outside dimensions are a little oversized to allow for
flushing up later.
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55) The new wood is glued and clamped into place. Once
the glue is dry, I will evaluate the strength properties of the music desk again. If
I feel that any areas of the desk are still prone to damage due to poor construction, I
will reinforce those as well before proceeding with the veneering.
56) The pedal mechanism was made of a combination of poplar and mahogany. The
area where all the stress from the pedal support rods and the pedals themselves was all
made of mahogany. What most people don't realize is that mahogany is as soft as pine
even though it is technically a hardwood. The areas that were under stress on the
bottom section of these pedals was in poor repair. Those bits which were still
intact were not such that I wanted to trust them in service. Therefore, I have
excised all the mahogany that was used to support the pedals and the support rods. I
plugged the support rod holes with maple and made maple blanks to install into the areas I
removed. I left enough of the original mahogany so that the rods which pass down
through the bottom from the supports running down from the piano remained sufficiently
intact. The new inserts are to be made of hard maple which will be veneered in
Rosewood. The original design simply faked Rosewood grain over the mahogany in this
area.
57) All of the gingerbread on every one of the legs had broken and all or part of it
was missing. This photo shows one of the legs with new gingerbread made from maple
after it was custom made and fitted to the leg. Also, the trim piece that decorates
the square section between the gingerbread areas was also damaged. Rather than try
to repair the damage, I removed the piece of wood entirely and made a new matching piece
which is now installed on the leg. The nails which help reinforce the glue joints
are set below the grade of the wood and will be covered to hide them before the leg
receives any finish. This new wood is harder and will not damage as easily as the
old stuff did. Also, the bits of soft wood left in prominent areas on the leg are
being made more rugged by soaking the fibers of this soft wood with a colored epoxy which
will match the Rosewood grain while making the finished piece more rugged than it was
originally.
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58) Here, you see some broken pieces of the original
gingerbread which was used in making a pattern along with the legs themselves. One
of six new pieces of gingerbread sit on the scroll saw to show what the new pieces looked
like before they were color matched and installed onto the legs.
59) This photo shows where the original holes that held the pedal support rods have
been filled with maple. Then the entire thing was trimmed off and cleaned up to
receive new wood facings that have enough meat on them to make the pedal mechanism ten
times stronger than it ever was from the factory. This photo also shows the new wood
faces that are to be glued to the mechanism.
60) These are all parts which received new wood on this day and are set aside to dry
until the next day.
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61) The holes which were drilled into the mechanism to hold
the pedals in place were cut away with the soft, worn out wood. However, before I
cut that away, I made a pattern of where the holes were. Now this pattern is being
used with some carbon paper to transfer the locations back onto the new wood.
62) The veneer that was on the cheek blocks was removed at the beginning of this
project because the glue joints that held it in place had failed. Now, I'm cutting
new Rosewood veneer to glue onto these blocks. I worked the Rosewood sheet so that I
could have two very pretty areas of veneer that matched each other to use on the cheek
block faces. They will be very attractive looking. The original was not nearly
as pretty so it is just as well we had to remove it.
63) Using clamping cauls to glue the first side of veneer into place. The top
layer that covers the more visible areas of the blocks will be glued on last so that they
will cover up the edge of this first layer.
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66) 
64) All the pieces needed to veneer the bottom of the pedal
mechanism have been cut to size.
65) Gluing the new veneer to the sides of the pedals. The front and back will
go on last to hide the edges on these side pieces. It is always best to figure out
what surface of a piece is going to be most prominent to the viewer and to glue the veneer
onto the wood substrates in the correct order so as to hide all your edges when possible.
66) The pieces of Rosewood needed for the top and bottom as well as the sides of the
music rack have been cut out. The pieces that will adorn the top were selected out
of the center of a piece of sheet veneer. This was very wasteful of the veneer but
it allowed me to select two exceedingly beautiful grain patterns which will match each
other. The top and bottom pieces are being clamped in place in this photo. The
next day, the front edges will be done. This is somewhat in reverse of the usual
order of gluing but because of the nature of the wood I have for the face along with the
fact that the pianist sees the facing edge better than the top, I chose to do the tops and
bottoms before the edges. I decided, I could hide the edges better in this way.
67) 
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67) When the veneer was glued to the music desk, one little
spot didn't take for some reason. So, I gave it some additional glue, worked under
the veneer with a spatula and then clamped it down to ensure the joint was perfect
throughout.
68) Now the new veneer along the front and back edges is being glued into place.
For this task, I chose to use mahogany veneer like the original had. This
will receive a faux grain to match the Rosewood. The mahogany bends more easily
around the curves of the front edge and its edge will be easier to disguise later because
it has no paper backer like the Rosewood has.
69) Using the original lid as a pattern to cut a new one from this Baltic plywood.
This plywood is used because it has many additional layers over regular plywood and
is guaranteed to be free of any internal voids. The wood it is made from is also
very dense and hard compared to what is used in ordinary plywood.