How to make a piano keyboard

Step 5 Preparing wood for the keyplank

The finished dimensions of my keyplank were a little less than 600mm wide at the front, about 37cm long and and 18mm at its thickest.

I used some pine pieces from the bellows of an old reed organ someone had cut apart with a saw - they flockpainted the case pink and squirted a lot of white glue on the bellows before discarding it. The trees were cut and dried about 120 years ago. The boards had some flaws which I had to arrange so they ended in places where they would be removed.

My octaves are 144.7mm wide, which is very small and almost the same size as 7/8 Donison-Steinbuhler standard keyboards you can buy for modern pianos. They are usually between 16 and 16.5 cm - Blüthner wrote that German keyboards had octaves about 161mm, and that English and French keyboards had octaves about 164mm, and as much as 166cm. 161mm works out to between 5 4/10 and 7 3/10 German inches, and the English and French from about 6 7/16 to maybe 6 15/32, to as much as 6 1/2 English inches at the greatest. In fact, like Steinbuhler, Blüthner, Wolfenden and piano engineer Siegfried Hansing all specify the overall width instead, so that the width of the octave is secondary. You can read an interesting paper about this here.

I was able to use all the bad pieces by cutting them in wedge shapes, which also made it so the grain followed the direction of the differently angled keys. I set them on top of the outline I drew on my work table, marked the joints and bandsawed off the waste.