But wait, there’s more!

To see the entire article just click this link!

They are resting on the porch swing  as I pack for a trip to a festival in North Carolina. There are two other dulcimers going with me but they are shy and chose to hide.

I have treated this steel straightedge very well, keeping it from direct sunlight to avoid warping and storing it where it would not be bumped or abused.

Today I was having a very difficult time leveling a fretboard. This is usually a straightforward task; I check the fingerboard with the straightedge and mark any high spots and plane them down.

I follow up the planing with a remarkably scary sanding block. The block is trued by planing and it’s straightness is also checked using the straightedge.

Once the fretboard is dead flat I plane and sand a bit of relief into the fingerboard. I check the depth and curve of the relief by placing feeler gauges between the straightedge and the fretboard.

After several failed attempts to get the fretboard dead flat I was perplexed; perhaps I was having a bad day, perhaps my sense of perception was off.

And then I thought that possibly “old reliable,” my trusty straightedge may have made the transition from accurate tool to annoying metal object.

And it had!

Both edges are no longer truly straight.  They both have a bit of a wave to them.  I don’t know what caused this to happen.

The mystery was solved but what to do now?

I have a 3 foot level that I have assumed was fairly true. I checked it and found that one side was dead-on straight! It’s a bit flimsy so I have to be careful not to flex it when using it as a reference.

The straightedge was expensive.

The level wasn’t.

When I bought the level I looked for the straightest one by placing them all against each other till I found one that seemed the flattest and most true by eye.

I think I got lucky!

Here is yet another explanation that makes little sense to me.

This type of mold helps keep the body symmetrical. Recently I have desired more flexibility during construction. Sometimes I’ll be working with wood that asks for a slightly different body shape for both acoustic and aesthetic reasons.  I am also currently working on a dulcimer that is an experiment in subtly departing from the usual goal of symmetry.

Traditional classical guitar makers often construct instruments on  a work-board called a solera.  The solera also serves as a jig providing references for the geometry of the instrument and allows for some flexibility when determining the shape of the body.

I’ve recently started using a solera.  The geometry of a dulcimer is much simpler than that of a guitar. My current  solera is simply a heavy piece of plywood glued and screwed to a brace.  The brace keeps the solera flat and allows it to be mounted in a vise.

The flatness of the solera is my reference for keeping everything square and parallel during assembly of an instrument. The solera also provides a good surface for gluing and shaping braces.  The elevation above the bench and the contoured outline of the solera  help make various clamping procedures much easier to perform.  The extra few inches of height above the bench makes working  much easier on my back too!

I can control the shape of the dulcimer by using spacers both within and outside the perimeter of the instrument.  My standard pattern is easy to set up using a few spacer blocks and one clamp at the waist. I have the pattern drawn on the solera in pencil to help me line everything up.

When using an outside mold I glued the soundboard to the top of the sides face up. With the solera I glue the soundboard to the sides by laying the soundboard face down and clamping  the sides down from  from above. Cauls placed around the edges of the top and back make simple work of adding arching  if desired.

I enjoy the simplicity and the freedom of working without a solid form.  I am thinking of making some simple add-on attachments to assist with other aspects of construction.

Over the years I have found that there are no hard and fast rules as to what works best. This goes not only for dulcimer backs but just about everything else too!

I have made dulcimers that weighed very little for their size as well as heavier instruments. The effect of weight on tone, in my experience, is very subjective. Each piece of wood is different and the influence of design and material must be considered as a whole. This is why I have “ballpark” measurements for thicknessing wood. The final tolerances are arrived at by feel and sound.

My friend Anna is making a dulcimer as one of her home school projects. Anna is an amazing young woman who knits, weaves, contradances, plays violin, acts and does many other wonderful things. Here Anna is thicknessing a back using my shop-made thickness sander.

A week later she was laying out the positions of the back braces:

Here are a few photographs of a maple dulcimer back I recently completed. After the braces are glued on I bring them to final height with a plane and shape them with a paring chisel and  scrapers:

This small scraper is great for cleaning up braces and beveling the edges of the center seam reinforcement strip. This strip of wood both strengthens the thin butt joint of the two halves of the back  and adds stiffness to the back:

Here is the completed back ready to be glued to the rest of the dulcimer:

And here is passionate dulcimer enthusiast eagerly awaiting the first musical sounds this dulcimer will soon be making.

I am currently working on two walnut dulcimers. One is curly with beautiful red, brown and orange highlights, the other remarkably clear and straight grained. Both dulcimers are beautiful in their own way.

Yesterday I braced the backs, glued in the labels and glued the backs to the two walnut dulcimers.

This morning, after almost completing flush trimming the back  of one of the dulcimers I saw that I had put the curly back on the plain dulcimer and vice versa!

Here is an artist’s rendition of how I felt when I realized what I had done:

I checked to see if I could remove the backs  and put them on their originally intended dulcimers. The bodies were shaped slightly differently from each other and once trimmed the backs could not be switched .

Here is a lovely dancer performing an interpretive dance of how I felt in that moment:

All is not lost though.

Both dulcimers look very nice and I am sure they will sound and play just as expected. They simply won’t look the way I had intended.

I thought I had enough coffee this morning. Oh well.