Piano Box - Willow Burl

My wife is a pianist so I decided to make her a piano box for Valentine's Day. I again used the willow burl I salvaged from a stump the city cut, down the street from my house. The whole thing is carved/routed from a single solid piece of wood. The piano keys are made from moose antler and the black keys are black walnut.

I started by drawing the outline of a piano to scale on a piece of hardboard which I then cut out with a jigsaw and attached to a piece of the burl wood with superglue. I used a 1/4" router bit to hollow out the edges and a 1/2" bit to hog out the rest to around 1 1/2" deep.



To form the legs I used the bandsaw where practical and a coping saw where not to remove the bulk of the wood.



Next I took it to the router table to clean it up. Once I got the legs close to where I wanted them I used a belt sander and sanding block to do the final shaping.





To felt the inside I masked everything off and applied spray adhesive to both the box and the felt and pressed them together.



The keys are made from a piece I cut from a large chunk of moose antler. I marked an arbitrary spacing on the combination square and used it to score the antler at regular intervals with an exacto knife. For the black keys I used some scrap black walnut and a chisel to get a general size, then used tweezers and a sander to get the final shaping.



After sanding down to 1000 grit with 2" rotary discs I used Danish Oil to make the complex grain in the wood really pop. I feel it turned out really well and the wife loves it. Another treasure made from an ugly piece of salvaged wood. Thanks for checking it out and reading my story!