Phase I

So here it sits in the middle of my apartment. The first order of business was to check the electronics and make sure they're working.

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The nameplate, still proud after all these years.	The dusty keybed. At least 6 keys are sticking and 1 string won't stay seated.	My matching little toolkit. Like a highschool couple at the Sadie Hawkins dance.	The stereo plug is right on the belly of the beast on the bottom. The 'damper' pedal is visible on the right leg.

I grabbed a stereo 1/4" cable to double 1/4" mono outputs and plugged it into my Roland JC120. There was sound from both channels. You may remember that the previous owner assumed the electronics were bad since the switches didn't work with the mono amp she was running it through.

Well, they all work fine, though I'm not sure what exactly the preamp settings all do. Anyone who may know this is welcome to fill me in. A few obvious things about the preamp is that it routes signals either left or right. What I don't know is what the blue versus red sides do. I can tell you one thing, after some experimentation, I've decided to leave the blue settings on and the red settings off.

I hooked the harp DI to my computer and tried the preamp settings, even recorded some samples. It was a noisy signal but all the switched worked fine.

So, with the simple electronics verified to be in working order I figure I'll start with the most obvious cosmetic and playability issue, the melted wax.

I mentioned that the wax holding the pickup coil in place had melted onto the red soundboard, well, it looked like this:

The wax was seriously stuck to the soundboard. This image is with the left pickup removed.

The wax had frozen some of the strings in gooey suspended animation. Plus with that much wax on the steel strings it can't be good for the intonation or tone.

There were two very fortunate properties of the harpsichord that I discovered. #1: steel strings, flexible and amazingly strong. I could just push them out of the way while I worked on #2, which is: whatever paint or material the soundboard is covered or created with it's amazingly resiliant.

The wax had adhered very securely to the soundboard and wasn't letting go easily. I had to Seriously scrape the wax off with a tiny screwdriver. I quickly discovered that it would be extremely difficult to actually damage the red finish. What a huge relief!

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A good view of the bottom of the pickup. You can see the red coiled up wires. I think what I'll do is just melt the wax back into the pickups.	You can see the greasy trail after the wax was scrapped off.	This is all the wax from under the left pickup. That's only half the job!

After the wax is removed it's a simple matter or getting a hot damp rag and rubbing off the rest of the stuck wax. After that it polishes up rather nicely. You can see in picture 2 of that last set where I've polished the soundboard. It's nice and shinny after its new waxing.

From the little I've read the soundboard doesn't really affect the tone, other than to act as a reflective surface when the instrument is played acoustically.

I don't know what the red paint is, or what material the soundboard is constructed from but I'm very happy that I didn't have to scrap that part and try to rebuild it...whew!

Plus, even with only half the job done it's looking a hundred times better!