Day 8: Drawing the Keyboard onto the Blank

The photos below illustrate the process of drawing the keys onto the keyboard blank. It's exacting and exhausting work. While I would like to charge on to cutting the individual keys out (using a band saw and scroll saw), the next step is to locate a nice piece of quarter sawn oak for the arcades - decorative pieces on the end of each key facing the player. As you can imagine, the arcades are prepared using a single piece of wood and are then cut apart as the keys are cut. More on this later.