In Bed with Kigali Keys

 

We have a key bed, more or less.

This is the original:

 

As you can see, we're lacking rail pins, both balance and front. We were going to attempt this ourselves, and in the long-term hope to find a local solution, but in the interests of finishing the project sooner, we're ordering them from Howard in the US.

 

So, what does this mean for the project?

Well, once the pins arrive and we have them installed, we can mount the keys.  

That's when it should get exciting. Once the keys are mounted, providing everything's built to scale, we should be able to place the Lirika action inside our piano and, with any luck, it'll line up. This would let us test whether our own strings hold, tune the piano, and test our flip-flop hammers. 

That's when we're going to know whether this is a viable business or not. If we encounter serious problems at that stage, we might not be able to continue, as we couldn't afford to rebuild from scratch. But if only minor adjustments are required, we'll make those and move on to tackling the action. The action is extremely complicated, so it's only worth us attempting if we're likely to mass produce in the future. 

Exciting times.

If we can get the piano playing with the Lirika action, we could also display at this year's Made in Rwanda Expo.

We're currently funding this with our own time and money, so we're always extremely grateful for any contributions.