>The prior sanding of the ivories was quite unnecessary. The job >could have been done with just peroxide (the cream, as I said, is >more convenient and labour-saving) and the ivory polished afterwards. I just watched the whole series. I was shocked at how many sanding passes he made, and how even the finer grits removed quite a bit of material. There's this to be said for it, the ivory ended up mostly flat, when it must have started out dished in the middle register quite a lot. That's fine, assuming you start with so much thickness that you can lose that much. Also, by sanding first, the peroxide didn't bead up because of old wax on the ivory. I couldn't quite tell what that last step was. It looked like he put some kind of solvent, like alcohol, on a soft pad on his sander, and then rubbed white tripoli onto it and buffed with that, to get a high sheen. If so, there was probably beeswax in the tripoli, so he would end up with ivory extremely smooth and shiny, but not slippery. From looking at the final segment and the way he was playing the piano, I doubt he was very aware of the necessity to avoid slippery keytops ... but you never know. When I saw him tuning, I thought that his stance looked quite uncomfortable and inefficient. The center pinning would have gone far better with a press, or maybe two presses, and a set of Don Mannino's reamers. He was using a tapered reamer. He got away without a press because the hammer butts had the plate, so he could release the center pin instead of pressing it out. He certainly aced the loops, with that simple bench jig. He must have made hundreds of thousands of them, all the same style. It looked like his string testing showed the bass bridge with negative bearing, but I saw no sign that he had done anything about it. Having gone to such lengths, even new keypins, you would have thought he might have popped for new hammers. Very orderly kind of work, and plenty of it for sure. I agree that the hot hide glue looked far too thick, and the process for bushing was very slow and tedious. He did end up with the b.r. bushings coming out the sides, though, which I don't do. I would have soaked out the old bushings, waiting a little and then pulling them out -- but I would also have ended up with soak markets on the keybuttons. How he did everything showed that he put a premium on looks. Buffing the hammer butt plates with a tiny wheel! The file looked like quite a good way to get the old butt felt off. Susan Kline
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