Hi Friends:

I decided to practice replacing keytops on an old overdamper piano at home. I've only completed about a dozen keys, but I ran into a problem. When I put the keys back into the piano, they are rubbing (ever so slightly) against the keyslip. Can I move the keyslip forward a millimeter to give the keys room to breath? It looks to me like the keyslip is connected to the keyblock and that the keyblock is the anchor with a couple of screws along the sides that go into the arms of the piano. Can I just unscrew the screws, move it forward and drill a couple new anchors for the screws?

Or would it be better to try to find to find keyfronts with thinner molding... even though I've done a dozen keys?

Any thoughts?

In Him,

Londonderrry, N. Ireland

The easiest way is to just shim between the keyslip and keyblock with thin cardboard (like a business card).

--Cy--

Good advice from Cy, and the place to start shimming is where you see a key binding against the keyslip. And continue shimmming as much as needed from there.

The real problem is the extra thickness of the molded plastic keytops and fronts. What you should do is mill down the tops and cut back the fronts by an amount equal to the additional thickness of the replacement material. Otherwise you will run into problems with the fallboard depressing the keys, or, as you have found out, the key fronts will bind on the keyslip. You can shim out the keyslip (as I had to do yesterday on a key job some other bozo botched), but you will have a gap bewteen the slip and the key block, and with some keyslips you can't get away with this anyhow. Do it right the first time. It saves trouble.

Tom Tuner