My own devices

Finished

2008-09-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-07T20:40:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-14T18:59:00.001-07:00

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

Upstanding

2008-07-14T18:56:00.001-07:00

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

Gold leafing, continued

2008-06-12T18:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-05T08:41:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-14T17:18:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-16T21:55:00.001-07:00

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

2008-02-29T22:06:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-14T22:22:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-06T13:24:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-13T22:04:00.000-08:00

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.

A rose is a rose

2007-12-23T19:57:00.000-08:00

The rose is held in place underneath the soundboard with strips of cloth soaked in hide glue.

Once the glue dries, the rose is firmly in place, and from the top looks like this:

As the only decorative element present so far, the rose looks alone and out of place, but once the rest of the decorations are there it will look much more at home.

Off the rails

2007-12-23T19:43:00.001-08:00

With the bass hitchpin rail successfully installed, I went ahead and glued in the other rails, starting with the most difficult one, the bentside hitchpin rail. This rail will anchor nearly all the 8-ft. strings, and it needs to have a solid connection both with the soundboard and the bentside, so I clamped it in both directions, like so:

Fortunately, the steam-bending I described earlier was successful, so the bentside rail went in without a problem. Afterwards I glued in the easier spine rail:

And last but not least, the cheek molding:

Once all the masking tape was off and all the excess glue laboriously cleaned up, the rails were finished.

Next I sanded and shellacked the soundboard, cleaned up any last traces of glue around the bridges, sanded again, and shellacked again.

Next I'll install the rose, then mark out and drill all the holes for the hitchpins and bridge pins.

Anchoring the bass

2007-12-10T21:34:00.001-08:00

The bass hitchpin rail is a small but very important piece; once the instrument is strung, the bass rail will hold the bass strings and be under tremendous strain, so getting a good join with the case is crucial. So first I put it in place dry and masked off the surrounding areas, to minimize glue cleanup:

Then I glued it in and clamped the hell out of it, to make sure to get the best possible attachment both vertically and horizontally.

Bent

2007-12-10T21:27:00.001-08:00

This odd-looking object is a wood steamer. A harpsichord contains several pieces of wood which have to be bent at fairly extreme angles, and you've got a much better chance of installing those pieces without breaking them if you first soak the piece in water overnight, then cook it in a steamer like this one for an hour or so, and then clamp it in the desired shape for a few days. The piece I was working on in these pictures is the hitchpin rail, which hugs the bentside of the instrument and anchors the 8-foot choir. After it came out of the steamer I clamped it like so:

In a few days it'll be ready to glue in the case.

Gilding St. Luke

2007-12-03T22:06:00.000-08:00

Many small tasks accomplished in the last week, including some more work on the new rose. The rose features an angel playing a harp, the traditional symbol of the Guild of St. Luke, to which many artists and craftsmen (including harpsichord builders) belonged in 17th-century Europe. First I checked to make sure it would fit correctly in the soundboard:

Then I took it out and applied a coat of shellac, then on top of that a coat of gold size, a sticky, resin-like substance which the gold leaf sticks to very neatly. Then I gilded it with gold leaf, like so:

The photo flash makes it look a bit more garish than it actually is.

A few days ago I glued on the wrestplank veneer, which is made of the same wood as the soundboard, using the usual go-bar method:

Once the veneer was in place, I drilled the holes for the tuning pins and glued down the 8-foot nut and the 4-foot nut.

Next up will be the installation of the hitchpin rails and case liners.

Soundboard down

2007-11-20T22:16:00.000-08:00

The soundboard has been successfully installed. Most of the time, harpsichord building is a solo endeavor, but to glue in a soundboard you need help. That's because hide glue has a very short "open time" -- that is, once you brush it on it sets up very quickly, so you've got about 90 seconds to brush glue on all the side rails and the 4-foot hitchpin rail, put the soundboard in, and brace it with go-bars. No one can do that alone, so for this one I enlisted the help of several friends, the harpsichord equivalent of a barn-raising.

In order to extend the open time of the glue slightly, I heated up the wood of the case with heat lamps, like so:

Then the troops gathered round, and we did the job. That's me carrying the soundboard at about 30 seconds in.

The final product:

Many thanks to Kevin, Ron, and Per for their help with the installation.

Countdown to installation

2007-11-19T22:07:00.000-08:00

Installing the soundboard is the single biggest event in the harpsichord construction process, and it requires a lot of preparation. The soundboard will be glued to the frame with hide glue and held in place on the go-bar deck with about 50 go-bars, which will provide tremendous vertical pressure. To keep the whole thing from collapsing, I prop up all the internal surfaces with wooden blocks of various sizes and shapes, as shown below:

When the installation happens, glue will be slopping everywhere, so I tape off all the surfaces which will come into contact with the glue. I've also built a set of cauls which will go between the delicate soundboard wood and the go-bars.

Installing a soundboard is a bit like launching the space shuttle; you plan it weeks in advance, then watch the weather anxiously as the big day approaches. If it's too cold or wet, you have to scuttle the launch and wait for a drier day.

In bloom

2007-11-08T22:49:00.001-08:00

This instrument will have a soundboard rose. The rose is an optional decoration with no definitive acoustical properties, but it has been part of Flemish harpsichords for centuries, and I figure the great builders of the past wouldn't have bothered with it if it didn't enhance the sound in some way. The first step in creating a rose is to make a template. I used an existing rose with a standard angel-playing-a-harp figure and added my initials, SR, which I made from modeling clay. I set the whole thing on a solid backing made from the same clay and prepared to make a negative, or mold, from which I could make additional roses. I set the master inside a wooden frame about 1 inch high, like so:

Then I mixed up the mold material, which looked like blue goop and had the consistency of toothpaste.

I poured the blue goop into the wooden frame, where it slowly settled into place.

The goop took a day to cure, and when I unclamped the wooden frame it was a perfect negative of the rose shape.

I mixed up the rose casting material and poured it into the mold:

The casting material takes only about 20 minutes to cure, so I made several roses. I'll pick the best one and install it in the soundboard, where at some point in the future I'll gild it with gold leaf.

Spare ribs

2007-11-08T22:03:00.000-08:00

The ribs are now on the soundboard, and all that remains to do to the soundboard before it's ready to install is to cut the rose hole. The ribs (the horizontal bars pictured below) help to stiffen the soundboard and keep it steady under the tension of the strings, and the cutoff bar (the other bar, diagonal to the ribs) defines the sounding areas of the bass and treble. First I glued them to the underside of the board, using go-bars to provide vertical pressure:

After the glue dried I scooped out the ends with a chisel, which is traditional.

Hello, Dolly

2007-10-26T12:06:00.001-07:00

One nice thing about harpsichords is that they're portable. Just about every harpsichord in the world weighs well under 200 pounds, and two people who know what they're doing can move one up and down stairs, into and out of houses and rehearsal spaces without too much trouble -- if one of those people has a dolly. Up to now I've used someone else's dolly when I needed to move an instrument, but yesterday I built one of my own. Pretty straightforward process -- cut 2x4's to the right length, nail them together, attach wheels and carpeting. But anything involving the table saw is a bit scary, and making sure the wheels don't wobble is a bit fussy, and overall it took a lot longer to assemble than I thought it would.

On with the bridges

2007-10-18T22:33:00.001-07:00

The two bridges, for the two 8-foot choirs and the 4-foot choir, are now glued onto the soundboard. Gluing down bridges is a tricky operation -- if they wind up in the wrong spot, you can't pick them up and try again.

I started with the 4-foot bridge. I put it in place, secured it with go-bars, then outlined the profile with small nails, so as to form a trough for the bridge to sit in. The nails look like this:

Then I masked off the surrounding area with tape, so as to minimize the amount of excess glue I'd have to clean off the soundboard.

At this point I'm ready to glue the thing down. Hide glue is nasty, smelly stuff, and once it's on the wood you've got about 90 seconds to finish the operation before it sets up and becomes unusable. So, moving quickly but not hurrying, I brushed the glue onto the soundboard and affixed the bridge, this time with many more go-bars.

Once the bridge was glued on, I waited about half an hour and then removed the tape and the nails and started to clean up the glue. The glue reaches a gelatinous consistency about 30 minutes after application (more or less, depending on the room temperature), and that's the time to clean it up, before it hardens. Once it was cleaned up, it looked like this:

Next up was the 8-foot bridge, which is much like the 4-foot bridge, only bigger and heavier and more difficult to position. Here's what it looked like, ready to glue:

Here's a closeup of the bridge just after gluing:

And after the nails and tape and excess glue were removed:

Next up: the ribs underneath the soundboard.

The heart of the harpsichord

2007-09-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

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.