woodturning - bad for your mental health?

camphor laurel bowl

I said I'd post picture of the bowls I've been working on. Herwe they are!

The bottom one (upside down) was the first one, and the top one, made from New Guinea rosewood salvaged from a tree removed from m y workplace, is the second.

The other photo is the upside down one, right way up. It's turned from a pice of camphor laurel.
A very pretty timber, though not without practical problems for the wood-turner.

Birthday present - the cheap way

The making of lutes, lyres and zithers seems to have ground to a halt for the time being.
The craft known as woodturning has me by the throat at the moment. I had intended that woodturning would be just one more skill to use in my pursuit of a usable musical instrument. But for some reason I find great satisfaction in taking a perfectly good piece of timber and reducing it shavings and dust.
And that is woodturning for you.
It does have it’s uses though. The photos herewith are of three items I salvaged from the debris on the floor, and which provided a cheapskates birthday present for my favourite arts student.
The little bowl (more of a saucer really - it started out much bigger) is from a nameless tree my back fence neighbour gave me after he had chopped it down. The thing that looks like a miniature beer barrel is a miniature beer barrel, and is turned from a 20 year old lump of Oregon, that was at one time part of a post holding up my pergola. These were made in my back-yard on the world’s cheapest lathe.
The biggest of the three I made in the timber workshop I attend once a week. This workshop should be called “Woodworker’s Heaven”. It smells of new and old timber, sawdust and glue, and the lathes whirr instead of clanking and rattling, and the chisels and gouges are sharp.
Anyway, this bowl is made from a piece of timber I rescued from a park after the city council had been lopping some trees. I was convinced it was a piece of black wattle, but Ian, the guru from the workshop, says it’s Raintree. He’s the expert, so it’s Raintree.
A nice bit of timber anyway, and I’ve got enough left to produce two more things.
Happy birthday my love.
Vsquared.

Lyre now complete - more or less

I posted a photo of this lyre in an earlier post, but without the soundboards. There are two soundboards, though you can only see one in the photo - one either side of the frame obviously.

They're held in place by the tension of the strings, which pass over a bridge, which bears on the sound board.

The soundboards are turned from cypress pine, which I glue-laminated in 20mm wide strips, then turned on a lathe. Rather pretty I think.

The roughish looking frame at the bottom of the lyre is just a stand I put together to make it stand up for the photo. I'll tidy it up one day, as it works well.

The lyre actually sounds pretty good, but I've no way of getting a tune out of it, as I can't play anything.

all the best

vsquared47.

It's been a long time

You might expect that, as it has been longer than a month since my last post, that the long zither would be pretty much finished. Alas and alack, that is not so.

Ideas for other things keep popping into my head, and I am easily distracted.

I think I've inherited this problem - Skywalker suffers from the same malady.

So, since the last post, I have not finished the zither, I have started another lyre, recommenced my woodturning adventures (at a woodturning workshop and on my el cheapo GMC lathe at home), and completed the lyre that featured in a previous post, by fitting the sound-boards it lacked, (wood-turned, and rather pretty if I say so myself).

The wood-turning was intended to be just a skill to be at the service of the instrument making projects, but it is proving to be hard to keep it in its pigeon-hole. It's an addictive past-time, and the quickest way to reduce a piece of timber to shavings that I know.

At the moment I have two bowls at the workshop that I hope to complete next week, plus a couple of things at home that I'm having fun with. I'll post photos of the bowls if they come up worth a picture.

For now, I've posted a couple of photos on of a 'lute', that I consider a failure. It's the first (and only) fretted instrument I've tried. I need someone with hands the size of a polar bear to stop the strings. (The neck is a bit oversize. I'll do better next time).

all the best

vsquared.

A real qin - I didn't make it!

My previous post mentioned the 'qin', a Chinese long zither. The photo on right is a real qin, advertised on ebay. It's about 1.2m long.

The ebay ad didn't tell me much about this particular instrument, but a classic and serious qin would have seven silk strings, tuned by tightening cotton or flax strings attached to the silk strings. The cotton is wound round a wooden dowel, that is turned in a hole.

Sound strange? Well the instrument has a history of around 3,000 years. They did things differently in those days.

It's played, so I've read, by plucking/strumming, and using the row of dots on the side as guides to where to stop the strings. It has neither frets nor bridges.

My reading also suggests it took many, many years to become a master of the qin.

I believe it!

All the best.

vsquared.

Long zither - starting a new instrument

Starting a new instrument. This week I started constructing a new instrument - a long zither, based on the Chinese "qin" (or "chin").
Note, I say 'based on'; I don't claim that this is a qin. I'm not that presumptuous. The qin has a 3,000 year history, and is considered by Chinese scholars to be one of the great musical, poetic and philosophic influences.

So, what I make is a long zither, influenced by the qin.

It will be about 1.2 metres long, by about 160mm wide at it's widest point, and will be strung with six bronze or brass strings.

I'm using one of my favourite timbers for the body - cypress pine. It's a pleasure working cypress; it cuts and planes well, glues well, and finishes beautfully. When it's being worked it gives off a wonderful piney/spicey/turpentiney smell. It can have big variations in colour and grain. The batch I'm working with isn't highly varied, and is a bit like teak in appearance.

As a contrast I'll use NT stringybark for zither pin planks at each end. The stringybark has a pink to reddish brown colour, and is quite hard. It unfortunately smells like dog poo when being cut or planed.

I unreservedly love the cypress, because it's pleasure to work, and if you make an effort with finishing it looks great.
I have a bit of a love/hate thing with the stringybark, because although I do like the contrast in colour it provides, I really don't enjoy working it.

As the zither progresses I'll post some photos to show the stages.

A slab zither

A zither is a stringed instrument, with the strings stretched across the sound chamber or soundboard.
Unlike, say, a guitar, it doesn’t have a neck to extend the strings beyond the sound chamber.
That’s it. Within that description it can look like anything.
For instance, the Chinese (and Japanese and other Asian nations) have traditionally used long zithers, with anything from five strings to more than 30. They are usually unfretted, with movable bridges.
I’ve made a couple of long zithers based on the Chinese “qin”.
The European zither is more commonly rectangular with multiple strings - often 20 or more.
The nearest I’ve made to the European style zither is what I call the slab zither. It’s made from a slab of camphor laurel, which was given to me by a very generous man. Thanks Peter.

I use mainly Australian native timbers, but camphor laurel is an introduced species. Its very common in parts of New South Wales and Queensland. In fact its been declared a noxious weed in some places.
In dairy farm regions it’s a real pest, because if cows eat the foliage their milk tastes of camphor!
But the timber is good to work - medium hardness, interesting grain patterns, planes and sands OK.
This particular slab (which means I don’t know if it’s all like this) seemed to be affected by some dark staining - perhaps fungal attack. As often as I sanded/planed it out, it appeared again next day.
I ultimately decided to lightly stain the main body to conceal the marks. In the photos, the natural colour of the timber is the sound chamber cover; the darker body is due to the stain.
This zither has 17 bronze strings, from .012” to .025”.