Step 1

The first thing I decided to do was replace the horizontal bar supports. The three that need replacing are all approximately the same dimensions, but there is a 1/8" variation from one end to the other in two of them. I decided to just cut them all the same.

I had to decide which wood to use, and elected to just use red oak from the local big box home improvement store (Sorry, Home Depot, only parenthetical free advertising on this man's blog). This isn't a part of the instrument that will be visible and, well, I just wanted to get started as soon as possible. It took a long time to find a six-foot section of 1X4 without too much warping (they store 12-foot sections upright and don't rotate them, which just seems stupid to me, but I guess it saves a bunch of floor space). My neighbor has a portable table saw and let me come over and use it on his porch. One fun side benefit of trimming 1/8" off the 3/4" side (the 1 in the nominal 1X4) was ending up with a couple 1/16" by 6 foot slats, which I think will make very nice shingles or siding for a dollhouse project. Here's a photo of the three pieces, which I know will be super thrilling.

 This photo shows a closer look at the support posts, many of which have snapped off the bases. This view is from the accidental bar set, hence the gaps.

 Another view...

 ...and another. I am not the world's best photographer. Anyway, you can see in the above photo that I numbered all the posts (of which, surprisingly, only one was missing) so I can match them up later with the horizontal supports and see how high to mount the suspension cord.

 Here is a view of the far end posts of the accidental bar set. I elected not to remove any of these from the support, since they were still pretty solidly attached.

Many of the posts had to be encouraged to leave the horizontal support, but as the support was broken it had to be done. On the natural bar set there was one broken and one intact support, and the intact one was pretty badly warped so I need to replace both.

 Here is the accidental support. All the bars are turned over because I numbered them in pencil. You can see the heap of posts there also; I will need to make quite a few myself to replace broken or missing ones.

I laid out the keys on a blanket and then rolled them for storage. They will all need quite a bit of cleaning before they can be restrung and mounted.

Yep, tied them up with a nice square knot. The cord, incidentally, feels waxed or oiled and is in pretty good shape, but I had to cut it to get it off so it's unusable at this point.

Here is the natural bar set ready to work on. I finished the second set at about 1:30 this morning. Next up is making all the new posts, which I will initially do in hardwood. I think I will likely end up using modern metal ones in the end, since I would then be able to take the bars off without completely unstringing them. I'm not totally sure about it though, since the wood ones are sort of charming and most are still in good shape. Incidentally, the builder didn't glue any of the posts into the frame, they are just pounded in and held by friction. I could see plenty of places where he had to drill second holes because the initial hole didn't quite work, so I hope I have better luck planning my post locations.

More to come, probably not as soon as this one did.