Harvesting Ivory from Pianos

RDCustomCues

RDCustomCues

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Ok I have a 1918 player piano and the keys sure like ivory nice grain paina color from being 90 years old. How hard is it to harvest the ivory and how much of the keys are usable? If i do not get it repaired I may try to harvest the ivory before selling it to a local piano repair business...
 
RDCustomCues said:
Ok I have a 1918 player piano and the keys sure like ivory nice grain paina color from being 90 years old. How hard is it to harvest the ivory and how much of the keys are usable? If i do not get it repaired I may try to harvest the ivory before selling it to a local piano repair business...
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I've got a hundred or so laying around here. About the only thing they are good for is cutting into strips and making deco-rings with thin dashes or lines like old joss's used to use but the inlays would be white instead of black.

Dick
 
Polish them up and drill a hole though them at the end of it to loop a piece of leather or string through....they make great book marks also.
 
BarenbruggeCues said:
Polish them up and drill a hole though them at the end of it to loop a piece of leather or string through....they make great book marks also.
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Does It ward off evil spirits if You wear them around your neck too, cause I've had a couple of people around me trying to bring the devil out lately, but I got chicken in the breadpan.:D
 
you could engrave a design on them on a cnc and wipe ink in like scrimshaw and make key chain tags or pool case tags many neat little things for art work
 
the white keys are Ivory(I assume) but,what are the Black keys made of??anyone know?
 
HDR10 said:
the white keys are Ivory(I assume) but,what are the Black keys made of??anyone know?
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Usually gabon ebony. The only downside of ivory keys is their thinness.
 
piono ivory

I've got probably a couple thousand pieces ( used to get them from a piono tuner in town), and used them for ivory inlay on top of the joint protectors , like in my avatar.
Sell them in packs of 50 every once in a while on E-Bay, people like them for scrimshawing.;) ;)
 
Cue Crazy said:
Does It ward off evil spirits if You wear them around your neck too, cause I've had a couple of people around me trying to bring the devil out lately, but I got chicken in the breadpan.:D
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Not sure .....but it will put a ruffle in the elephant huggers shirt collars if they find out your wearing dead elephant.

Hope it's not me..........I can be pretty good at times driving the devil out....or in...which ever direction he's headed at the time.
 
BarenbruggeCues said:
Not sure .....but it will put a ruffle in the elephant huggers shirt collars if they find out your wearing dead elephant.

Hope it's not me..........I can be pretty good at times driving the devil out....or in...which ever direction he's headed at the time.
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:D LOL, yeah I might as well paint a bulleyes on My neck if I was gonna do that. Those huggers can be brutal.

No sir Not you, infact not anyone here. Just day to day BS as usual.:(
 
You ought to test the white keys. Dollars to doughnuts they're not ivory.

Beginning in the late 1850's the piano makers started using celluliod, a newly invented ivory substitute. By the 1870's it was used on almost every piano made both in America and in Europe. Burn a small piece of the material. If it is ivory it will smell like burning hair, if celluliod, it will burn and smell like plastic.

They are very hard to identify visually except that the grain is too consistent in the plastic.
 
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