For one thing it is remarkable to discover, through the process of reverse construction, how much craft and skill goes into making even the most humble piano. The solid maple frame is fleshed out with boards of poplar or birch under a dark swirling skin of walnut or mahogany veneer. Hard, curved beach limbs form the pinblock to space the strings over the thin, flat straight-grained soundboard of Sitka spruce. Metatarsals of hornbeam connect felted hammers through an intricate arrangement of joints and pivots to long fingers of basswood coated with wafer thin slices of white bone ivory and in the gaps between these teeth, black ebony wood.