Some quality time ...

It's been a while since I've been able to post anything as there has been a comedy of errors with Comcast (my primary Internet service provider).

First there was an "area wide outage" which went on interminably. Finally, I couldn't believe an area blackout could go on for over five days so I kept pressing the buttons for customer service despite the admonitions that it was unnecessary. After getting through, I was told the outage was no more so there must be a problem with my modem (which had just been serviced two weeks before).

A technician was scheduled to come out the next afternoon. I waited until 6 PM and called "hey, is the technician still coming?" The response was "oh, we canceled your service call as there is an area wide outage." No need to tell you what I was thinking about Comcast at that moment.

I entered the weekend without service. On Monday morning just as I'm settling in at work I get a call from a Comcast service technician, "I'm at your house, why aren't you?" Apparently, the canceled service call had been rescheduled -- but without informing me. I asked her to get started and I'd get there as soon as my boss showed up for work -- he was, of course, 45 minutes late. I called to say I was running late and the Comcast technician informed me she'd found the problem: AT&T had cut the line on the roof when they were repairing their line.

All that took eight days -- hence no posts.

On to quality time with Zelda...

From the beginning, I knew that Zelda would not be playable until her lyre was repaired. One of the supporting pegs had broken and the base had dropped over an inch thereby ensuring that none of the rods in the lyre touched any of the working pedal parts.

The first step last night was to take the lyre off the piano and take it apart so it could be reassembled. Given my limited knowledge base at this point my mantra with Zelda is "do no harm." So I'm trying to do everything in a manner that is reversible. However, the broken posts required a substantive fix -- so once the bad ends had been sanded down out came the heavy duty epoxy -- not reversible. Hopefully, future fixes won't have to be so drastic.

Tonight I decided to strip the old black varnish off the lyre before it was reinstalled. Another mystery solved -- Zelda's cabinet is definitely mahogany, not walnut. But given that it took three hours just to strip (will save the refinishing for later once I make some other decisions) the lyre -- I looked at the rest of the cabinet with some awe and humility. Bringing Zelda back to her former glory may be more than just a winter's project. This is going to take some real time and patience.

Beginning to work on Zelda is somewhat similar to starting a new relationship -- you discover things you love -- and others that are challenges.

Tonight when I finally got the lyre reinstalled, I discovered that the center pedal is a true sostenuto. Wow, I've never had a piano before that had that feature -- it's something that you find in only the finest of instruments. Chalk one up for Zelda's good bones!

On the other hand, her appearance of being in relatively good tune is smoke and mirrors. I checked the A49 key against the tuning fork. Zelda is more or less in tune with herself but is slightly over a half pitch flat throughout the instrument. She hasn't seen A440 in a long time.

Panic! Given Zelda's age would it overstress her to bring her up to pitch?!? Am I stuck with an eternally out-of-pitch antique?

So I e-mailed Randy Potter, the founder and principal teacher, of the piano tuning and technical school I've just started with. I really didn't expect a reply for quite a while; but came home this evening to find a long, detailed response. He assured me that in the 33 years and over 10,000 pianos he'd tuned, he'd only found ten that couldn't be brought up to pitch safely. None of the qualifiers applied to Zelda.

He did, however, have a few choice words for Zelda's former tuners - my future competition. The one I can repeat is "schlock". The instrument should never have been allowed to get that far below pitch. Apparently a lot of so-called tuners tell people that older instruments can't be raised when in reality it's an excuse for shoddy work and a quick buck.

Relief! It'll be a while before I'm ready to take on that task; but at least I know it can be done.

So continues what will -- no doubt -- be a long relationship.