The heart of the harpsichord

Another year, another harpsichord. This one is going to be a Flemish double, with parts from ZHI. The Flemish double comes case assembled, so I'll be starting at a point about 3 weeks into where I started the last one. Here's how it looks now:



I ordered this kit with no soundboard, registers, or jacks, so the first order of business is to make the soundboard. As an experiment, Kevin and I are going to construct two soundboards, one with fir, the other with the more traditional pine. One of them will go into the new instrument, but I'm not sure which yet.

Step 1: cut several boards to approximately the right length. The orange grease pencil arrows on the boards indicate the grain direction, for planing purposes.



Step 2: get the boards ready to glue together. That means making the edges perfectly flat, which you do with the joiner. Kevin shows how it's done:



Step 3: glue the shortest three boards together. It might be possible to glue all nine boards together at once, but that would be hugely and unnecessarily difficult, so I'll do it three boards at a time, then glue up the three subsections.



These boards are laid out ready to clamp together, but not yet glued. Once the edges are glued together, I'll tighten those clamps, and keep them flat with vertical pressure courtesy of the go-bar deck:



While those pieces dry, I can set up the next three boards the same way.



Once all three subsections are ready, I glue them together (first carefully preparing the edges with the joiner) and leave them to dry, using the extra-long clamps and a whole forest of go-bars.



When the go-bars are down, here's the result:



Now we're ready to cut the soundboard to approximately the right shape with the band saw. More exact fitting will come later.



Now it's planing time. I plane the whole thing to a high shine, top and bottom, until it's about 4.5 mm thick all the way across. Then it's ready to fit it to the case more precisely, and after a great deal of marking and measuring and sawing and planing, it fits very nicely.



The last step before installation is thinning. The soundboard needs to be different widths at different spots, so I'll mark out the target widths in the correct areas, and go after it again with the plane.