Efficiency

Once both power tools were set up and ready to go, I started work right away. I started by using the disk sander to grind down the sharp edges of all the bars. I was amazed at how well this sander could do it. I made it about half way through the bars when the sanding disk become too worn out to be productive. I went to Home Depot and bought a few more of a coarser grit. These worked even better.

Once the edges were done, I was ready to start the tuning process. This process will probably be the most time consuming task and most likely very frustrating. You start by measuring out the midpoint of each bar and then drilling dents into the bar starting from the middle and gradually going outward toward the nodes. 

The next step is to take the bar to the belt sander and grind down all the bumps in between the drill dents. This will remove more aluminum and create an easier surface to then drill into the bar again. This process is repeated with smaller adjustments each time until you have the pitch you want. I quickly found out that the sanding belt I had was also too fine of a grit and wasn't removing the aluminum as well as I needed it to. I had to order new belts on Amazon because no local stores carried what I needed. So at the time of this post I'll have to wait for those to come in the mail. In the meantime I decided to do the first set of drill dents on each bar just to get something done while I could. Hopefully in my next post I'll be able to show the process to fully tune a single key.