One day we went to visit my friend’s house, and a couple of houses down from his we spotted this piano that had been thrown out. It was in pieces, like it had been dropped from the sky. I asked my friend to come with me and we salvaged as much as we could, knowing that I would be using the parts for projects for some time. I made a piece of art from the keys, saved all the hammers, and all the eye hooks, which I have used as string trees and in my kalimbas for years. I finally ran out of them in 2022. I cut the fall board into a few pieces, made a kalimba our of one piece and hung the piece with the company logo as its own art piece. The coolest part is that while taking it apart, I saw pieces that were hand signed, and had dates in the late 1800’s.
The final product. I like how many of the keys are chipped Sorting the keys Taking the hammers off We took each piece apart…took quite a while Signed, I think, in September 1894 by ‘Mary’ This one looks like it says ‘Cornelius’ Patent from 1878. I used every one of the 100+ eye hooks on other projects I cleaned each key by hand with water and vinegar Making my wall display. I didn’t have clamps so I used rubber bands to glue together the pieces a few at a time, then weights to push together the larger pieces. I hung this part of the fallboard by itself
