October 17. We drove to Black Mountain in an all day rain to find Song of the Wood which turns out to be a lovely shop on a quirky main street filled with autumn colors, hippie cafes (ate lunch at The Green Light, next door), and eclectic shops ranging fom hardware to wine.

I tried to follow Old 70 out of Old Fort to avoid the six lane interstate ascent of the Black Mountains. Go to the end of Old Fort's main street, turn left, keep going. Follow the signs (actually, flee from signs that say "Dead End") and you come to a gravel road (Mill Creek) which will take you over the mountain and into Black Mountain. We didn't continue beyond pavement because it was raining hard and had been all day, and for all I knew the road would be as slick in the rain as the one up Wilson Creek. But there it is. Along the way we found "Andrew's Geyser" erected in celebration of the railroad reaching the Blue Ridge late in the 19th century, and twice restored during the 20th. Is it artesian? Pumped? Why a "geyser"?

At Song of the Wood, Amy bought me a set of rosewood hammers. I tried out a few and selected short, double-sided ones. A treble clef has been scroll-sawed into their business ends. One side of the head is thin, hard wood for the familiar hammered duclimer sound; the other side is covered with a veneer of felt. I'd never used a soft-surfaced hammer. It is, as the reserved fellow keeping the shop (and tuning psaltries with a Korg CA30) said, "The difference between a harpsichord and a piano." The felt hammer does to the instruments' strings what Steinbeck's hands did to the bells in Loreto: the softer hammer causes the strings to glow with tone.

I inspected Jerry Reed Smith's showpieces as well as dulcimers by Mastercraft and some by Rick Thum. A few others I didn't recognize. No one, and I mean no one, builds dulcimers with the strings passing through the side bridges. Over the side bridges, one and all. Every instrument in the shop, including Jerry's first (framed behind the counter, the only instrument in the shop with a floating soundboard), used some manner of dowel-like bridge. Delrin or hardwood. Off to the hardware store down the street to find straight dowels. I also bought a router bit for my Dremel tool so I can cut a neat groove in the soundboard to hold the dowel in place.

When I got the dowels home and dry fit them to the dulcimer, I discovered why every dulcimer at Song iof the Wood had tilted rather than flat pin blocks. Try to run strings over the dowels and attach them to smooth, vertical hitch pins. Don't stand too close while you bring the string up to pitch, because likely as not that string is going to ride up the hitch pin and then off over the top. It will snap across the soundboard with unmitigated quickness. So unless I can modify the pinblocks, it appears that I am committed to RD's sidebridge design. Which is another way of saying that I am committed to RD's side bridge design. Modifying the pin blocks is like modifying the keel on a ship. Everything is built around and anchored to those maple blocks and they will not be changed in any substantial way. I could use the Dremel to notch the hitch pins, maybe, but I could just as easily ruin them. Ruining even a few would be tantamount to ruining the pin blocks. Maybe I could somehow extract damaged hitch pins and replace them with tuning pins, but fixing accidents in the notching process would be a large job with an ugly outcome.

So I can't follow the examples I saw at Song of the Wood, afterall, but I can at least build RD's design better next time. More and longer screws (damn it). And rather than use a generic template, I started measuring the actual spacing of my pins so I can drill new side bridges without introducing wierd bends. I used a taut piece of picture hanging wire to draw a line from pin to pin. Marked where the wire crossed a line drawn from top to bottom of the soundboard and perpendicular to the strings. I marked off a line parallel to each pin block and began projecting the vertical measuremens to these angled lines. Remember to allow for the width of the tuning pin and the thickness of the sidebridge... and... and... Wait.

This way lies madness! Why not just prep the side bridge blanks, lay them on the dulcimer, and mark where the holes go directly? Forget about allowing for this and that and about accurately transferring measurements from paper to perpendicular to slant to wood. Go straight to wood.

I don't much mind stringing the dulcimer a second time (this log ain't on a site called "Team Sisyphus" for nothin), but "charming" is not how I will describe doing it three times.

 

Andrew's Geyser, between Old Fort and
Black Mountain, the old way.

 

Mill Creek at Andrew's Geyser.

 

 

The Green Light cafe.

 

Laying out holes based on actual pin placement
for a new left-side sidebridge (before coming to
my senses). This way lies madness.

 

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Building: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Refinements, etc: 16 17 18 19