Charles Petzold

When I first constructed the keyboard frame of the Troubadour Virginal and loaded it up with keys, I got a kick out of “playing” it and at least hearing the sound of clacking wood.

But those clacking sounds must inevitably be suppressed, and that was the job for Construction Day 8, which was this past Saturday. There’s a whole Troubadour Keyboard FInishing video by Seymour, who was an intern at Zuckermann, which has lots of helpful information concerning this and related jobs:

But I didn’t get as far as I thought I would. More on that later.

Anywhere in the keyboad where wood hits wood must be softened with rolls of cloth supplied with the Troubadour Virginal kit. Two layers of back rail cloth muffle the sounds of the tail ends of the keys as they fall against the wood:

It’s installed at an angle to partially compensate for the different key lengths. I pushed in the little nails with a brad pusher that comes with the kit and then a hammer to get them down lower below the surface of the cloth. You don’t want the keys banging on the nails!

If you look closely, the cloth buckles a bit around key 10. Eventually I’m going to have to slice the cloth at that point and lay it down flat. For the front rail cloth, I first put nails in at the two ends while stretching the cloth a bit:

The brad pusher was sufficient for the front rail. The little nails went in like buttah. You’ll notice that one strip of cloth cushions the naturals when depressed, and the other the sharps. There was supposed to be sufficient cloth for two layers, but I only had enough for one.

In Seymour’s video at 3:08, she shows how to measure key dip and says that the proper dip is 5/16". But I’m seeing more like 1/4":

So perhaps I didn’t need two layers of back rail cloth, but I definitely don’t want another layer of front rail cloth. I will let things settle for a while — the cloth tends to be tamped down with use — and then check again and perhaps make some changes.

The 55 keys themselves must be cushioned at the point where they contact the jacks. At time 3:43 in Seymour’s video, she shows a technique of empirically determining where the jacks hit the keys, but I used a sheet of carbon paper on the keys rather than a pencil on the bottom of the jacks. Each key should get 1½” piece of cloth. My Troubadour Virginal kit came with 84” of key end cloth. To reduce measuring, I first cut this cloth into strips of 1 foot, then doubled each over and cut in half. Now they’re 6". Do it again, and they’re 3". Once more, and they’re 1½".

To glue the key end cloth to the keys, I used tacky glue, which is probably not what the professionals use:

I’m gluing the cloth at an angle solely for the aesthetics of the final result. Every so often, I took a break from gluing the cloth pieces to the keys by cutting away the excess cloth on the keys I already did:

(Idea for short story: Man fulfilling a life-long dream of building a harpsichord accidently slices off finger. Irony!)

Here’s all the scraps from the process:

Sometimes when I sliced off excess cloth, I sliced a little bit of the key as well! But no fingers yet.

And here are all the keys back in the rack:

The steps of key end cloth don’t look quite as pretty as I hoped, but there’s still some cleanup required. Much of the remaining noise from the keyboard is scratching from the guide pins at the tail ends of the keys. This means they need to be filed more into an oval shape.

I next began the job of key balancing, which is shown beginning in 7:30 in Seymour’s video. However, I didn’t like this technique at all. After contemplating an altenative approach overnight, I didn’t like that either.

I kicked the job of balancing the keys down the road until I think of an even better approach.