First I needed to make sure of the final lengths of the sharps to ensure their back ends wouldn't collide with the nameboard when the keyboard was in place. Until now there has been no nameboard, so I went ahead and made one, set the keyboard into the instrument and slid the new nameboard into place. The point was to check whether the front layout line drawn on the key panel (still visible on the sharp levers) aligned with the front face of the nameboard. It did, so I was able to establish a final sharp length, cut the necessary quantity of sharps from my ebony sticks and bevel the front of each sharp at the strip sander to a 10 degree angle.
Next, a straightedge was clamped along the final position of the sharp fronts, leaving a clearance of 1 mm between the naturals and sharps. With a flashlight shining up from underneath the key frame, each ebony sharp was visually centred in the gap between natural key tails and glued down with thick cyanoacrylate glue:
The oily nature of ebony can make it problematic to glue, so the undersides of the sharps were wiped down with lacquer thinner just before gluing to remove any residue that might interfere.
When the glue dried, I put the keyboard and nameboard back into the instrument to see how everything looked:
The nameboard is presently too tall but can easily be trimmed to size later on.
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