Music
October 16. Up and at it. Had the last strings installed by 9:30. I turned an aluminum peg on the lathe. One end inserts into a dowel (tightly); the other fits into the back of the dulcimer (loosely), hence we have a short leg for tabletop use.
I carried the finished instrument upstairs to tune it.
It went very well! Notes kept going flat as I tuned additional courses, but that's to be expected as the steel corset closes up.
From 11:00 until 1:00, I tuned. The trick is to tune one string in each course to an absolute pitch, then match the other strings in that course to the first one. Did the bass bridge. Then started working my way up the treble bridge.
The instrument made these deep groaning sounds. I'd say like a wooden ship at sea, except I've never been on a wooden ship at sea.
And then, with the top five courses to go, A(440) went flat. Then it became G, then G-flat, then F-sharp... and then the dulcimer made a sound like a Steinway falling a short distance to a hard landing. Part of the left side bridge had pulled away from the soundboard. I de-tensioned most of the strings to stop whatever was happening from continuing. I stared at it for an hour or so.
Unveiled it anyway. Quite a fun show and tell. Not as much fun as it would have been had I been ready to run scales from top to bottom and back again, but fun.
What went wrong:
1) There were supposed to be ten screws in each bridge, not ten distributed across both bridges.
2) The holes in the left bridge were too close to the soundboard so the strings pulled up too steeply, hence more powerfully.Either rebuild the bridges to specs or try a design where all strings go over the side bridges and press them down. I am leaning toward the second solution (a dowel with a chord sliced off with all strings passing over its top). But I've also verified that I have the maple and cherry stock downstairs to rebuild RD's design more carefully.
We thought up some hairbrained schemes to fix or replace the bridge in place, but it seemed clear that I was going to have to pull the soundboard and make proper repairs. So I waited an hour or so for something brilliant to occur to me then started unwinding strings. 3:30 to 5:15. There are bundles of strings hanging in the galleria, labelled 1 through 29 so I can put the pre-selected, pre-measured and pre-trimmed strings back where they belong. It's discouraging, but really, I am only back to yesterday morning, with a finished dulcimer waiting for strings.
I only got impatient and yanked at some strings once (bloodying myself in the process).
We're going to Song of the Wood tomorrow; I'll check out other makers' side bridges and then pick a fix to implement over the next couple of days.
But, really, wait till tomorrow afternoon. Wait! Look! Duck and cover.
