Garden season is coming fast. I was traveling for work through most of March, April, and May last year, so I'm looking forward to being home to plant this spring. I'm getting ready to build a raised bed flower garden. My wife is planning a collection of native plants from High Country Gardens. For a frame I will use 2x6 untreated lumber. My oldest raised vegetable garden is three years old and doing fine so I'm not concerned with rot. The plot will probably be six feet square, and eleven inches high (two boards). I am going to fit the corners together with good joinery, rather than just some exterior screws like I used on my other raised beds. I may use dovetails, 4x4 corner posts, or both. Where the long edges of the two layers of 2x6 meet I'm thinking about ripping a groove, and setting a strip of wood in it to hold them together. The hardest part of that will be cleaning off the stuff that has accumulated on the table saw since my last project. I may put pavers around the outside to minimize trimming, I'm not sure.

If you are thinking about parting out a piano to salvage the wood be warned!

I have a piano.
It's old.
Someone wrote a name and "Wichita Kansas, 1917" on the harp.

It's the standard turn-of-the-century (1900) upright piano, this one was made by "Wing & Sons" and was once probably very nice. Unfortunately the frame started coming apart when I put it in my living room, in addition to all the other problems that a hundred-year-old piano has. So after a few years I removed the keys and replaced them with a Korg keyboard. After the keyboard started having electrical problems I moved the whole mess to the garage, and now a year or two later I've finally started parting it out to salvage some of the wood.

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In no particular order, some observations on this piano tear-down:

It took years for me to admit the piano was worthless as a piano. It was so old, so big, it took so much effort to build... But those are sunk costs. You have to look at it for what it is, not what it was.

As I cut the strings one by one it really sounded like it was dying.

Most of the nice big pieces of wood were either built up with very good joinery or full of holes.

The spruce sound board has some kind of miracle glue between it and everything it touches. It will be difficult to salvage in large pieces.

I had to lift the harp out by balancing it on a hi-lift jack. Somehow nothing went wrong and no one was injured.

The old wood is very dry and brittle. I cross cut a piece with a hand saw, and it was very easy to cut but it had a lot of blow out on the edges. When I tried to brush this off it was literally like brushing a cactus - a lot of very small splinters!

Anything more than a few decades old will use flat-bladed screws. I bought the biggest flat screwdriver at Lowes for about $6 and it & a cresent wrench were the only way I was able to take out the big screws. I broke three smaller screwdrivers.

I will not put any of this on the table saw until I get a metal detector. I've found several blind nails hidden in joints that I don't always even recognize as joints.

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So far what wood I can salvage is destined for these projects:

The lid has turned into an American Girl doll bed.

The 3/8" thick spruce sound board is going to be dovetailed into some other wood, either the sides or other stock, to become a very pretty tool tote. Or possibly the drawer fronts for a machinist's chest.

The thick platform from under the keyboard will become a hand tool workbench.

The four big supports in the middle of the back will become the legs of the workbench.

The two big supports from the outside on the back will become the cross members for the legs of the workbench.

The big flat panels that faced front are very nice, I'll have to come up with something for them.

The latest Woodcraft flier has something I've thought about but never seen. It's a digital readout for a table saw fence. Basically it looks like the head from a digital caliper mounted on the end of the table saw fence, so that you get a digital readout of the fence position. It comes with a 60" strip that attaches to the saw, this looks like a film with a trace in it (or a printed circuit board) from which the head can read position changes as it passes by.