JoshPrime Makes Stuff

Hey Reader The time has finally come to move the piano into it's home in my living room. It isn't quite done, there is still some fabricating to do, but that can all be done and applied to the piano later, and I am interested in parking my car in my garage again. Let's get in to what I did! This is where we last left the piano. The casters are in place, the piano is painted and it was time to move on to the next steps. Then a truck arrived with my childhood bedroom on it. My folks decided that I could store my own crap, and so I got 44 boxes of toys, clothes, textbooks, and other fun memories that distracted me from piano construction for a while. The next step was antiquing. I never really thought of antiquing as being challenging, but I was having a bit of a hard time. Essentially, you water down brown (or any color you want, I suppose) paint. Then you rub it into the furniture, and immediately wipe it off. In theory, it will stick to the deepest crevices and give...

Hey Reader! When I was getting the piano to me, there was an incident in which one of the four casters snapped. I figured this was a good opportunity to update the casters, and replace them with rubber ones that wouldn't ruin my floor. I went out to my local home improvement store with the broken caster in hand and found myself faced with a lot of math questions. Casters are weight tested and you need to make sure that you have casters that can accommodate the weight of the thing you are attaching them to. The casters in sizes similar to the one I already had were rated to about 90 pounds. I was faced with some questions that seem silly now. Question 1: Is that 90 pounds per caster for a total of 360 pounds (90 times 4). I quickly answered that one with, yes - obviously. Question 2: How much does my piano weigh? Average piano weight is 400-500 pounds, and the harp is 150-200. Since my harp is gone, I could expect the piano to be about 200-350 pounds. To be safe, I decided to ...

Ok Reader, I know I said I would talk about the big hole in my piano. It all started because of this fret bar. I don't even know if that is the real name of it - not that it matters since I am ripping it out. It sticks out too far and would interfere with the shelving I am trying to build. I do think it is beautiful in it's own way and I wish I could figure a way to incorporate it, but maybe on my next piano conversion! There are a few youtube videos that show this being glued in place and coming off easily. I      did not have that experience. Turns out, that mine is screwed into the back of the piano and not all the screws are in a position to be removed without completely disassembling other parts of the piano that I am not trying to deal with. I got a tube of fresh bladed for my rotary tool and set out to get the thing out. I started with a Spackle trowel because it was wide, but eventually needed to use screwdrivers to get it loose. It was really in there! Di...

Hey Reader! I am not quite sure how to break up this piano project because I am feeling a little scattered. Anything is going to be more interesting than 11 months of wall smoothing so I guess I can do whatever I want. I want to paint the piano to match the bench, so the first step is to sand it. Honestly, the electric sander made this an incredibly easy job. I am using a paint primer combo and doing 2 coats of the dark color and 2 coats of the light color. With all that new paint, sanding feels like an extra step - but it will make the paint adhere much better. Getting into some of the carvings is a challenge and I sanded by hand in those areas. The electric sander definitely did a better job, but the smooth areas are also the areas that are going to be treated roughest so I guess it is better to have them done right. It took me a few days to get the dark color on right. The picture below isn't quite the best way to protray how this went down. The top, the decorative bit...

Hey Reader, It is finally time to turn my attention to the piano itself. One of my favorite parts of taking on new projects is getting to learn just enough about them to be dangerous. For example, I am learning a lot about pianos and how they are built. For example, there are 10,000 moving parts on a typical piano. These are complex machines and are largely build by hand! I could totally talk about it with someone who builds pianos and now sound completely clueless. Don't ask me to build one though, that is a lot! The first thing I had to learn about was the random block of wood that is filled with screws. A cursory googling revealed that this is called the pin block. The pin block has pins - fancy screws - in it that perfectly align with the metal harp. The strings are then attached to the wood at the top and bottom of the upright piano, across the harp and into these pins. There are 230 pins in the piano. Many of the blogs I read about piano conversions talked about how...