Here’s a summary of the ironwork I’ve removed from this patient to date:
I had a look to see if the tuners had any identifying marks, but nothing exciting to report. Some of the brass plates are worn at the bearings, but the brass cogs, spindles and the worm gears are perfectly fine. We’ll have to decide whether its worth getting the bearings rebuilt, rebushed or just get new tuners. I’m not a metalworker.
Here’s another bit of fun for later :-(
I started gluing some of the newer and cleaner cracks first, and cleaning up glueing edges.
My “in situ” lamp is very useful.
Here’s a horrible mess to clear up. Nails didn’t help at all.
Here’s a closeup of one of the crack edges. The wider part is where the crack sits just below the FFs and the thinner part - about 6-7mm - is the lower bout.
I have had to break the longer cracks right open in order to properly clean the gluing surfaces, which are contaminated with varnish and dust and goo. And what looks like read lead paint in places!
This is a dry run of the first big crack clamping setup. It gets tricky near the FFs where the wood has twisted under bridge pressure. It’s going to be interesting getting this to clamp up tightly.
