Finished

Now the nameboard is on, the buff batten is done, and all that's left is to deliver it to its new owner. Next up will be a Flemish single for a new customer -- stay tuned.

Lids on

I've put the lids back on, and the instrument is almost mechanically complete. A few more odds and ends to work on, and more voicing and regulation adjustment, and then it'll be ready to launch.

Almost done

We're in the harpsichord homestretch. The front and back choirs of jacks are cut to length, with quills and dampers installed. Voicing is an ongoing process, and the 4' choir remains undone, but the instrument is playing, and the bass strings are warming up and sounding better all the time.

Papers

The Ruckers-style decorative papers arrived, and they're almost all installed.

Upstanding

The stand is done being stained and varnished, and I've fitted it to the bottom of the case.

Gold leafing, continued

All the gold leafing is now done, and the decoration is complete except for the Flemish papers, which haven't shown up yet.

Here's the case, with gold bands:



I've also attached the endblocks to the keyboards, like so:




With the endblocks on, I could do the final fitting of the keyboards inside the case, where they sit very snugly.



Next up is register construction. The registers are made out of two pieces of wood, with slots in one piece cut on the table saw and a veneer cut from the same piece. The registers guide the jacks up and down on the keyboard.



Then I glued the veneer on and set it to dry:

Gold leafing

The decoration phase is finally, gradually, coming to a close. The painting is all done, the gilding is mostly done, and the Flemish papers are on order.

Here's the front flap, masked for painting the internal color:



And here's the lid, flap, and fallboard, all with painting complete.



Next up is the gold leaf application. Gold leaf comes in rolls, about a half-inch wide and 200 inches long, which amounts to about a tenth of an ounce of gold. It's tricky stuff to work with, because it's so thin and light the slightest breath of breeze causes it to flutter away.

Here's the case with gilded moldings:




And the lids, with gold striping:



And the first part of the case striping, on the tail:

Blue boards

The final shade of blue has been determined, and I mixed up a big batch of it out of permanent white, prussian blue, and venetian red, in a proportion of approximately 10:3:1.



The first bit to get the blue paint was the case tail, followed by the cheek and bentside.





The lid, flap, and jackrail also have their first coat.

The painting continues

The various keyboard end pieces are all sanded, rounded, and painted black. I'll add another coat or two over the next few days.



The jackrail will also get gold leaf on the moldings, so I've added the yellow ochre undercoating there as well.

Preparing to paint

All the painting surfaces are now prepared with putty and primer, and the current business at hand is selecting paint. These are some of the candidates:



I mixed up a batch of the leading contender and put it on a test panel, which will soon get gold stripes as well.



All the moldings on the case now have an undercoating of yellow ochre, which will be overlaid with gold leaf.

Unhinged

The various lid and flap battens are now all attached, as shown here:




Once the battens were on, I was able to line up, drill, and affix the hinges.




Next up was the fallboard, which fits in front of the keyboard:




And now we're ready to putty all the little dings and scratches in the case, sand the whole thing, and then paint. Here's the puttied and sanded fallboard:




Painting will be a long process, but it's almost ready to start.

Bottoms up

The case bottom is now on the instrument. It comes in two pieces, front and back. The first step is to mask off the case, because glue will be dripping everywhere:



Once the bottom back is glued on, I used almost every clamp in the shop to hold it in place while it dried. In the picture below you can see the trunnels (definition) which hold the bottom to the case crosspieces. They're sticking out in this picture, but I planed them down later.



Next to go on was the bottom front, with considerably fewer clamps (and more trunnels holding it to the lower bellyrail):



After the glue dried, I had to make the thing fit. It was too big on all sides when I glued it on, so I planed down the sides, spine-side (the easy side) first:




The bentside was more difficult, but in the end it was all planed flat.

Fitting the keyboard

While getting ready to nail the case bottom on, I checked to make sure the keyframe fit correctly inside the keywell, and also dropped in a few jacks to make sure they would sit centered on the keys. Everything looks to be A-OK.

112 keys

After long weeks of shaping, smoothing, sanding, spacing, leveling, and balancing, the two keyboards are almost, but not quite, done. There's still some final touches left to apply, but I'm almost ready to move on to something else, and not a minute too soon.

Backracking

Work on the keyboards continues, but I've reached a point where it's time to make a new part -- the back rack which manages the lower keyboard guide pins. I started with a piece of basswood of roughly the right size and shape, then marked it with lines where each of the keys will go. Using the drill press, I drilled holes through each of the lines:




Then with a thin-kerf table saw blade and a special jig to hold the piece, I cut the grooves for the guide pins.



Cutting all those grooves took a while, but then it was ready to screw into the back of the keyframe.



I've still got a ways to go with the keyboards, but now the keyframe is finished.

Keyed in

If the soundboard is the heart of the harpsichord, the keyboard is the brain, sending commands to all the other parts of the instrument. 112 keys on a double-manual instrument, and it's the builder's job to fuss over each one as if it were a Fabergé egg. Each one must be shaped, positioned, and polished until they all line up with perfect balance and alignment.



I attached the bone sharps to the sharp keys of the upper manual, using a straight edge to keep them even. After attaching the bone pieces, the sharp keys are front-heavy, so I cut away some of the wood on the bottom of the key, like so:



The keyboard preparation phase will be going on for the next few weeks, and then I'll turn my mind to decoration.