Sheldor the Tumblr - Protea Farmer

Restoration incomplete - back to the drawing board

After months of work, I managed, with help, to bring this little fiddle restoration project to what I thought was a satisfactory close.  I had spent a lot of time carefully perfecting the varnish, working it to a shine.  A friend taught me how to use a file to work the fingerboard into a good shape for the neck.  All of these things were completely new to me - and all of these things have taught me a great deal about instruments and instrument making throughout the process.  As I worked, I would try something, fail, and then I would do it all over again to get it right.  In the end, I was extremely happy with the results, which you can see in the images below.

On this lovely past weekend, I went to visit my step father Mark who was going to show me how to set up a fiddle, something that I have never done before.  It is a tedious processes, especially when you are new to it.  It took some time getting the peg holes cut correctly and the pegs shaved down right.  It definitely took time getting the sound post in.  It took time setting up the bridge.  Below, he is showing me how to file small grooves into the nut for the strings to sit in.

We also worked on stringing the instrument and he showed me how fine tuners work.  We were eventually ready to put the final tuning into the instrument and give it a good play. 

Below is Mark playing my restored fiddle for the first time.  After having spent months fixing it up, I was so thrilled to hear what it sounded like and I must admit that it sounded pretty fantastic.  It had a nice bright happy sound to it.  I was thrilled.

Or, I should say, I was thrilled until we turned the instrument over and noticed that the back seam had completely cracked open.  The pressure of the strings was apparently too much for this little wooden box.  It was a pretty significant set back - certainly a bit heartbreaking after all of that work - but I haven’t given up on the fiddle yet.  After a bit of carefully spent time, I have managed to remove the back from the fiddle and am now looking into how to sure up the seam to make it so that it will have many future years of good happy playing.  While I hoped that this post would be about a success story for a fiddle now looking for a happy home - it turns out to be a “to be continued” story that I will write more on as the project continues to advance.  I hope it will see a happy home yet!

Ocracats

Ocracoke Island has a cat problem.  You can read more about it here:  http://www.villagecraftsmen.com/news031710.htm

These feral cats were hanging out in front of the Ocracoke Post Office.  It is actually a bit of a sad situation, especially for a cat lover like myself, but I couldn’t resist taking this photo anyways.  I’m a sucker for orange cats and there was no shortage of them here!

Portsmouth Island

Established in 1753, Portsmouth Island, NC has been deserted since 1971. 

Today the 3 mile wide, 22 mile long island belongs to the Cape Lookout National Seashore and one must charter a boat to visit it.  There is no electricity.  There is no drinkable water.  Back in the day, Portsmouth Island was a lightering point.  Ocean-going vessels would unload their cargo to set them higher in the water so that they could traverse the shallow sound, while smaller vessels with a shallower draft would be loaded with the cargo and would follow behind the destined ship.  In the island’s peak hay-day, there were almost 700 people living on the island.  Today, only one town remains on the island and it remains as a true ghost town, populated only by mosquitos which hover above the seemingly endless salt marshes.  The grasses in the salt marshes are so sharp to the touch that it is said that women would use the points of the grass as sewing needles.

The above scenes were what greeted us as we got off of the small boat.  Just a 30 minute boat trip from Ocracoke, we would be left on Portsmouth to explore her wonders for roughly 5 hours examining what she had to offer. 

The town was interesting.  From a practical standpoint, things were relatively close together, but there were no sidewalks made of concrete or brick, no flowers, no gardens, no mail boxes, nothing.  They resembled hunting cabins on a scrubby beach surface that would be forced to endure hurricanes and other aggressive weather with no protection from any large hills or mountains.

I’ve never been much of a photographer.  I carry a small credit card-sized point and shoot camera, but even so, I couldn’t help but imagine how beautiful this place would be at 6 a.m. in the morning when the light fog was just lifting from the salt marshes amongst a rising sun.  This would be a wonderful location for black and white photography.

While I don’t have a lot of pictures of the town, I can tell you that Portsmouth’s “downtown” consists more or less of one quaint building which was the post office/general store.  It admittedly reminded me of the old post office in Woodward, PA where I remember getting penny candy when I visited a friend in my younger days.  While I don’t have photos of any of the following, Portsmouth also sported a couple of cemeteries and a life saving station with the most frightening set of stairs into the lookout.  The life saving station boasted old boating equipment that would have been used during the day to help get stranded ships off of the shoals.  Jason and I didn’t spend a lot of time wandering around the village because the mosquitos were horrible. This admittedly accounted for the lack of pictures of the town itself, though honestly, with the images above you have seen almost the whole thing.  

We had been warned of the insects prior to the visit, told to buy Cutter’s bug spray with 20% deet, which we did, but we hardly doubt it made a difference even after aggressive efforts to turn ourselves into walking toxic waste dumps with bug spray and sun screen.  The insects were just everywhere. 

As we were dropped off on one side of the island, we knew that we had a 3.5 mile trek to the other side of the island where we would be picked up by our chartered boat.  We had a small simple map describing the features of the island and were told that we would have a 1.5 mile trek to the beach through some shrubby material and tidal flats before we reached the dunes and the beach.  As the town was filled with greenery and stale water, we decided to break into a near all-out run to the tidal flats to get away from the bugs. 

When we reached the tidal flats, they seemed to last forever.  The tracks that you see there are actually made by a park service vehicle that is similar to a beefed up golf cart or “gater” as we call them.  Jason and I both carried tree branches with us to wave around our bodies to produce a slight breeze in order to discourage the insects as much as possible.  I unfortunately do not have any pictures of the dunes because I could barely stop moving my arms long enough to take a picture without getting 40 new bug bites, but below you can see when we have approached the wide beach.  There is just a sliver of ocean in the background.

Thankfully, roughly 1.5 miles of our walk was along the hard sand where the water washes up on the beach - a completely mosquito free zone.  Amazingly, the locals have not heard of any instance of West Nile Virus down there.  It is not an immediate concern of theirs as it has not become an issue yet.  One can’t help but wonder when things will change for them.  Certainly, if West Nile Virus becomes an issue, no one will be visiting Portsmouth Island anymore.

The island had a couple of small pools of water where birds would bath and relax.

I had never seen such a wide, clean, untouched beach before in my life.  Portsmouth would probably be a lovely place to visit during the cold months when the insects have subsided.  I’m not sure that we will ever go back again, but we were certainly glad to have went.  It was an island that truly gave you a sense of being in a very desolate place.  I always thought of desert islands with a bit of romance, but having visited Portsmouth, I am positive it would have been a bit of a hardship at times to live there. 

Fiddle Repair Project #2 - It’s a kit

Due to the fact that my own personal fiddle kit project is going to take a healthy bit of time and the repair work on the russian violin is simply going to take time as I wait for things to arrive in the mail, etc. - my step father hooked me up with another instrument which should be much more straight forward to repair.  On quick look, there is really nothing structurally wrong with the instrument.  It is missing the sound post, the finger board, the nut, and all of the other little additions that make the instrument playable, but other than that, the only thing that is really terrible about it is the horrible finishing job someone did on it.  That should be straightforward to address though.

I brought the instrument home tonight and took a crack at trying to take some of the finish off.  It has has been really slow going.  Whatever varnish-like substance was put on this instrument is about a quarter of an inch thick in places, but as I began peeling it all away and could see some of the detail much closer, I realized that this instrument was made by someone from a kit.  Take a look.  (In the below picture, I have removed the finish from only the top of the instrument.)

Closeup of the bad finishing job.  The varnish isn’t even even to the point of the coloring being wildly different in places.

So why do I think that this is a kit?  Well - a couple of basic reasons. 

1.  Whoever put the purfling in made poor work of the thing.  The purfling groove was so badly cut and widened in areas that slivers of additional wood had to be added in in various parts of the instrument.

2.  The back of the instrument is not bookmatched.  While this is not horrible, it looks incredibly familiar to me - because it is exactly how my kit looks.  Someone really concerned with building an instrument completely from scratch would have made sure that the bookmatch was there.

3.  There is no signature to the piece, which isn’t unusual, but certainly it is not something that you would necessarily do if you were building a kit.

4.  The top and back are decidedly thick.  In the case of the kit that I have, the thickness of the top may be around 5 mm thick, which is about twice as thick as you would want a violin/fiddle to actually be at the center.  My fiddle kit front and back are also this thick.  I have been spending a lot of time learning about how I am going to thin those areas down into more reasonable sound boards for a violin.

So - on to repairs.  My step father, Mark, gave me a fingerboard that I can use to replace the one that should be on this instrument and over the next few days I will continue to work to fix this fiddle up.  Due to the low quality finishing job that I am currently removing, I may end up having to lay down a base layer of stain just to address some of the blemishes in the wood.  Then I will lay down violin varnish and turn this into a nice introductory instrument into something that someone can learn to play on.  :)  With any luck, Mark will be able to help me get it set up, playable, and into the hands of a willing and eager to learn.

Violin/Fiddle - In the white

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I had so much fun building the ukelele with Ray that I decided to try to build an instrument as much as possible on my own.  I already have two ukeleles (a concert and a soprano) so I didn’t need another uke.  When I was checking out Stewart MacDonald’s website, I noticed that they had a fiddle/violin kit.  I can play a handful of different instruments, but the fiddle is not one of them.  I decided to give it a try and learn more about the structure of the instrument, how they are built, and how they sound when I learn to play them.

After two tries, I finally have the purfling inlaid into the face of the instrument.  The first attempt was unsatisfactory.  Many dollars later, I ended up buying a Foredom on Ebay that I could use to do inlay work and other general grinding activities.  I used the Foredom to drill out the first purfling attempt and then recently was able to put in my second attempt.  See below.

It doesn’t look too bad, but there are a few spots that I am unhappy with, but they are all spots that represent the process of my learning a lot about instrument building.

I still have to put the purfling in the back, which hopefully will take a lot less work than putting the purfling into the top. 

Completed Soprano Ukelele

After 5 months of work, and a lot of help from my friend Ray, I finally completed my soprano ukelele.   A lot of people have asked to see pictures of the final thing - so here they are.  Sorry the pictures aren’t great.  I underestimated how much sun was coming through the living room window.

There is some great wood grain on this instrument.  I felt pretty lucky to end up with as nice of a quality of wood product as I received.

The final finish on the instrument took me a month to complete and it was all done by hand.  There are 5 coats of sanding varnish (a 50/50 mixture of varnish and water), 10 coats of 10% varnish of which all of them I sanded off completely.  The goal is to get every grain in the wood to be filled with varnish so that the final 3 coats of varnish you apply will look like glass.  In between each of the final 3 coats of varnish, I took 1200 grit sandpaper to the instrument.  9 days to let the final 3 coats cure.   Then you take the 1200 grit to the final coat one more time and make sure that every has a dull look to it.  We want no shiny spots anywhere.  Then I put numerous coats of furniture paste  on the final finish and buffed it out to bring back that glass shine.  See below.

Not only does it look beautiful - but it plays like a charm.  :)

Repair of the Russian Violin

A couple of months ago after the completion of my ukelele, I decided that I wanted to build another instrument.  Unfortunately hurdy gurdies were entirely too cost prohibitive and so I decided to build myself a fiddle from a kit.  It wasn’t long before I realized that I didn’t have the tools that I required to complete the fiddle kit and that I was going to need something else to pass the time.  I asked my step father if he had a fiddle lying around in his workshop that I could work on restoring.  He certainly did, and I found this one:  a Russian violin made in 1928 by Piter Sokolowsky.  This was to be my new project.

The original state of the instrument was such that it had an old heavily cracked varnish on it which I completely removed.  It had many cracks in the front and was in fact missing two pieces of wood from the front.  The instrument was also barely held together with the old glue that remained.  It was also completely missing a neck.  The neck that I am going to apply to it is actually a neck from a completely different instrument that was probably not in a condition to be saved. 

With the usage of some medical tubing and my pressure cooker (an idea from my step father), I was able to steam the instrument apart. 

There is a small bit of inlay at the base of the instrument, part of which will need additionally repaired.

Upon steaming the instrument apart, I could see that I was indeed not the first person to have taken it apart.  It had already undergone repairs to stablize the cracks in the face.

I also needed a “new” neck for the instrument….

I decided that I had best ensure the stability of the neck and clean all of the finish off of it as well.  I actually left a little bit of the finish in the tight spaces of the scroll, but that should only add to visual interest with the final product.

Here is a picture of the neck for the Russian Violin beside the neck of the kit that I am currently working on building…..

Lastly, I had some time to sand the individual pieces for the body in order that I could make sure that I got as much of the glue off around the seams as possible.  I want to make sure that when I put this instrument back together that I have the seams as clean as possible.  Unfortunately the old hide glue can get sort of crusty and turn black.  While some of the seams will still display that a bit, I just didn’t want the old glue to effect the structural integrity of the regluing of the instrument.

In the below image I am merely holding an edge to the back of the instrument.  You will notice that the back is completely rounded and meets the side near exactly.  This is a common characteristic among Russian violins.

My hope is that I will be able to bring this instrument back to life so that it can be played again in the future.  I like the idea of bringing an instrument from a complete state of disrepair and turning it into something that people will appreciate again.  With any luck, as I learn with this project and the fiddle kit project (post to come on that sooner or later), I won’t mess it up too badly!

The Building of Two Ukes - A Tenor Comes to Life

Up until now, the majority of the images posted on this blog surrounding the building of our two ukes have been of my soprano uke.  This is in part because Ray has provided an enormous amount of fascinating technical and creative support to the process of building my uke which I am not only learning a lot from, but greatly enjoying.  So when we work together, we usually make progress on my uke.  Then in the evenings, he will catch up on the work for his uke, and take pictures as he goes.  I get to see the final product of the work that he does, but I don’t get to see how he manages not to have the excessive amounts of glue all over his uke that I tend to end up with on mine!

For starters, conceptually the jig for his tenor uke is the same as the jig for the soprano.  It is made in exactly the same fashion, just merely larger in size.  He lets the sides of the uke body relax in the jig a bit and then fixes everything up to get the neck block in place.  One of the things that you will notice is that the neck block of the tenor block is significantly more substantial than the neck block of the soprano uke.  This is largely because the neck of the tenor is much longer than that of the soprano and also because the body length is much longer and in some ways, probably more fragile.  This neck block will provide some much needed support.

Below is a better close-up of the neck block.  Note that there is a block of wood that is lighter colored in the neck block.  That lighter-colored piece of wood is just there to help support the clamp.  You can also easily see how Ray has again used household saran wrap to protect the jig from getting glue on it.

In another glueing session, Ray gets the base block in place.  Again, household saran wrap to protect the jig and he glues the base block.

Below is a full view.  You will also notice in the image below that there are small wooden wedges helping to push the shape of the uke into place so that the bottom block will fit the form well.  One of the things that Ray and I quickly realized when working with the curved wooden form of the ukes was that the curved sides may not conform exactly to the shape of the jig.  The jig was crafted after a pattern that came with the kit.  That being said, it became clear that we were going to have to work with the form of the curved sides of our future ukes as they were and not push them to hard into fitting the jig itself.  That being said, the fit of the curved sides wasn’t wildly different from the shape of the jig, but there were areas that were not perfect in both instances of our ukes.  This is probably just a natural part of the uke building process that we are seeing.  Being flexible.

Within no time, Ray is ready to get the bracing started on his uke.  While these posts are a bit out of order at this point, the process of taping wax paper to a low line where the bracing would sit was something that we did on my uke as a result of how well it worked on Ray’s uke.  You can see below how nicely he taped the area below the future bracing.

Once the interior of the uke is taped up, he gets it set into the jig and clamped into place.  Ray has applied pressure to the waist of the uke to help get the form of the uke into the best possible shape.  In the image below you will also see that the bracing is in place, but it is merely just sitting there.  Ray is accomplishing the bracing for the front of the uke first and in this case, the bracing sits flush against the top of the sides.  Like my uke, his uke also has a body that is tapered, though less so than mine.  The bracing for the back of his uke will come later.

Ray tests a new form of clamping to hold the uke into shape by applying gentle, but firm pressure front to back of the uke.  This method actually ends up working well as it stabilizes the form of the uke in a new direction.

Ray keeps his glueing technique top secret - so the next image of the tenor uke that we see is of it all glued up, clamped with clothes pins, and drying.  You will not see any glue dripping anywhere.  This is a fine art.  No photoshop was used in the production of these images.

The Building of Two Ukes - Clamps and Purfling

I haven’t written about the clamps that Ray has been making in a while - so here is a little update.  Ray finished putting varnish on the wooden spools and had even done a bit of prep-work for the threaded metal posts that would be the frame of the clamp itself.  Some washers and wing nuts would bring the full effect into view.  We were only missing one thing.   Padding for the clamps.  Ray found some cork-based contact “paper” that would do the trick.  He had pre-made circle templates for us to cut out and all that needed to be done after that was a hole punched in the middle so that the threaded metal post could fit through.  So, we began a small little assembly line to start getting the clamps put together.  The contact “paper” ended up working wonders and stuck nicely to the spools in order to provide just a little bit of padding and grip to the instrument when the clamp came together on the form of the uke.

The clamps came together quickly and we packed them up to prepare them for action.

With the glue dried on the bracing for the soprano uke, we were ready to start looking at the face of the uke.  It was time to try to get the purfling around the sound hole into place.  The purfling consists of very thin loose strips of plastic:  three white and 2 black.  The idea is to alternate them and cut them perfectly to fit the sound hole.  I have to admit that I was nervous about this part, simply because there is a lot of room to make mistakes here, but thanks to Ray, the final result was phenomenal.

In the image below, you can see the purfling being set into place.  This is the measuring and pre-glue phase.  We carefully cut everything a little on the long side and then slowly cut back the individual strips so that they will fit perfectly.  Ray shows me a neat little trick of undercutting the purfling strips in order that they sit easily down into the groove around the sound hole. 

Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the “cutting the purfling” stage, but it felt like we needed all 4 of our hands to get the purfling right.

At any rate, once we get everything set, we can see that the final work is pretty snug and looks great.  One of the most difficult part of setting the purfling is getting a clean seam.  Often people end up with rather messy looking seams, but this one turned out amazingly well.  One of the tricks to making this happen is to get the purfling lined up in your hands, cut a nice 90-degree angle and dab a little bit of super glue on the end of the purfling so that you can easily keep all of the individual strips together.  Once you have those stabilized, it is much easier to do the rest of the job.  In the picture below, you can just barely see the final seam on the left-hand side of the sound hole.

A couple of beads of super glue the whole way around the sound hole set the purfling into place and we just wait a bit for it to dry.

One of the issues with the purfling is that it is actually about 1/32” taller than the face of the uke.  Thus, we will need to figure out a way to get the form of the purfling flush with the wood face of this future instrument.  Ray said that he had seen that a sharp chisel can be used to scrap the material away.  I have never used a chisel before in my life, but Ray gives a demonstration, holding the chisel at almost 90 degrees and begins gently scrapping away the purfling.

Then it is my turn.  The purfling comes away easier than I had expected because the chisel is so sharp.  I find myself having to pay a great deal of attention to the chisel as to make sure that I am truly scraping at a 90 degree angle.  I do not want to scratch or scrape the face of this future instrument.  (You can also see the remnants of the super glue that we used to set the purfling into its final place above.)

It is difficult to appreciate the final work on the purfling from a picture on a blog.  It is really something that you need to be able to feel with your own hands.  However, you can see from the mess that a lot of gentle fine tuning needed to be done!

The Building of Two Ukes - Bottom Block and Bracing

When I left off at the last post, Ray and I had only glued the neck block into place on the soprano uke.  At that point in time I also hadn’t posted any pictures of the work done by Ray on his tenor uke.  Unfortunately, pictures his tenor uke are going to have to wait for another post because I have forgotten that the cd he gave me of images from his project will not work in my computer’s broken cd drive! 

So here is the gluing of the block at the base of the instrument.  We have used garden variety household saran wrap to protect the jig from the glue that we are using which is important since there is a high probability that the jigs will get used again.

Before long, I can take the uke out of the jig and see how the form is holding up.  The form of the instrument isn’t completely symmetrical yet, but the ribs that we apply to stabilize things should help get us closer to where we want to be.

At this point, I am ready to get the ribs (bracing as they call it) of the instrument in place.  I make a rough measurement of the lengths of the two parts of the bracing that will sit under the face of the uke and begin cutting them.

Ray then helps me test to see how the bracing will fit the uke.  He also has a plan for how we might be able to try to hold the bracing into place while we glue it to help ensure that we get the best shape possible out of the future uke.

The fit ends up being good enough.  My skills in measuring wouldn’t win me any awards.  The bracing ends up being perfect on one side and about 1/8” short on the other.  Ray communicates to me that it will work out fine.  No worries.  We are ready to glue.

Ray has thought about how we are going to hold the bracing in place and we experiment with the method shown in the picture below, however we end up abandoning this method in future glueing activities.  Essentially what we tried was to use the interior form from our jig to apply pressure to the exterior form of the jig.  You can see that we had broken the pattern up and saved the pieces “just in case”.  This method worked, but it ended up being rather complicated and more difficult to hold into place than we had expected.  At any rate, I applied an overly liberal amount of glue to the bracing and the interior part of the uke where the bracing would sit. 

With saran wrap protecting the jig again, we got everything into place so that I could sit over night to dry.

So the next day I come over, Ray shows me the bracing on his uke.  It looks great.  Here is the only picture I have on my camera at the moment of his uke.  You’ll notice from the picture that the neck block on his uke is substantially larger to support the weight of a longer neck on a longer body.

Ray experimented with how he applied the bracing to his uke and found a method that he thought would work better.  This method involved painter’s tape and garden variety household wax paper.  First what you do is hold the bracing in place and then trace a line on the edge.  For the back of the uke, at least in the case of the soprano uke, the bracing will be angled.  The soprano uke has a tapered back and in fact loses a quarter of an inch of depth or more over the height of the body of the uke with the fastest part being at the base and the skinniest part being where the neck joins the instrument body.  Once I had the line traced, I then ran tape about 1/32” below that line.  (The tapering effect is difficult to see in the below image, but it is there.)

Now what I needed to do is tape just below that some wax paper to the painter’s tape.  This would help protect the jig from glue.  Next, I brushed glue on the area above that blue tape liberally.  The tape and wax paper is there to catch any drippings and as the glue sets, about 2 hours in, we can start peeling the tape away with the dripped glue.  This helps keep the form cleaner.  This method actually works great for Ray.  I however seem to apply glue to things like a first grader.  My hope is that the additional glue will only improve the sound of the uke.  In the picture you can see that this time we used clothes pins and basic office clip supplies to hold the bracing in place.  These basic household items do a fine job.

The next step is to start working on the front of the uke and get the purfling into place.