Keyboard: Cutting apart the naturals

The last thing to take care of with the key panel still in one piece is to glue a wide strip of felt along the back where the jacks will sit, to keep them from rattling against bare wood. I used fish glue for this, as it is said to be a good choice for gluing fabric and leather. It won't harden the bottom of the felt too much, which would reduce its effectiveness as a cushion.

Once the glue dried, I put a strip of wide masking tape on top of the felt and retraced the lines between the keys which had been covered up by the felt.

At the bandsaw, I installed a 5/8" thin kerf meat-cutting blade with very little set to the teeth. A wide blade is useful for cutting out keyboards as it tends to cut straight more easily, and a thin kerf means the blade doesn't eat into the key levers too much.

Cutting proceeds in several stages, starting from the back and working towards the front:

• First, cut the keyboard into octaves along the lines between B and C
• Next, cut each octave apart along the line between E and F
• Cut along the lines between sharps and naturals up to the front of the key tails
• Cut off the lowest (GG/BB) and highest (c''') keys

This leaves a bunch of keyboard sections 3 and 5 naturals wide:


The sharps are still attached at their fronts and will be cut out with a fretsaw.

The two outside keys are already detached at this point, since they don't belong to any of the sections shown above. I installed a rack pin into each and laid them in place on the key frame: