Harpsichord tuning and maintenance

In our living room, we have four keyboard type instruments... my wife is the button presser. Anyway, the harpsichord is more my baby and it is by far and away the largest of the instruments... measuring in over 2 metres in length. However, I love having a bit of tinker on it occasionally... or to use it for rehearsals (I normally play in ensembles with harpsichord)... at least, that is the plan... but between my real music work (violin/viola/damore) and parenting and just normal life... I rarely get to play it. However, on my list of things to be constantly doing (at least once every few days...) is to keep it in tune.

The shifting weather from winter to spring means that the wood has shifted (there is an argument for the metal straitjackets of modern pianos...) , and the instrument is woefully out of tune, and there are keys sticking as the internals have all shifted a few millimetres this way or that way... So, much tuning to do, and also a summer long investigation of the insides to see if I can keep it playable condition.... in time for the shifting of the season! Haha... well, it is the sort of thing that is only a big job if you don't stay on top of it... and being a violinist and not a harpsichordist... I've looked after my violins instead!

So, yesterday... I had meant to try and quickly tune it... roughly a half hour job to do the four sets of strings (each keyboard has a single main set of strings, and there is also an 4 foot (octave higher) and a doubled set linked to the bottom keyboard). I tune to rough Valotti temperament (system of dividing the semitones, and solving the circle of 5th problem) and with a starting pitch of A=415Hz.

However, like all jobs that have been neglected for way too long... I soon found that keys were sticking or that quills were hitting the wrong string... so, I've settled on tuning only the main set of strings for the bottom keyboard to start with (they don't hold pitch at the moment, having been so far out for so long...)... and trying to fix the mechanisms so that quills are hitting the right strings at the right time, and that all the keys are clear of sticking...

This just means that I have to expose the mechanisms... which is an easy thing to do... just lift off the cap, which stops the jacks from jumping clear of their positions...

Now, this was one of the more problematic jacks... it was from the 4 foot on the lower keyboard, and it was hitting the string (which was really out of tune...) whilst the set was supposed to be decoupled from the keyboard. Needless to say, that made it really hard to tune the main string... and so I removed the jack while tuning the main set.

I also tried tinkering around with screw to alter the position of the quill (hopefully moving it a little further from the string, so it wouldn't touch when decoupled). However, this fix wasn't a success... and I think that the entire set of the 4 foot jacks need to be shifted a couple of millimetres to the right... there is a screw mechanism to do this... but I had left my screwdrivers in the attic, and I was too lazy to get them yesterday... However, I am typing this in the attic, so it will be the first thing that I do!... if I remember....

Getting the jack back in is a right pain in the arse... there is that small hole there... and a second hole about 10 centimetres underneath... in pitch darkness. So, you are wiggling it around, trying to find the hole which is pretty much exactly the same size as the wood of the jack that is going down....

At least the main set of strings were tuned... I have to go over them again today to make sure they have held pitch and temperament. But this is the summer project... slowly getting the instrument back into playing order... it works at the moment, but the sticking is getting really annoying!