Look what I made! (Part 3)
A (nother) harp!
This is the last thing I finished before truckin' off to law school in 2006. Actually - no, I made a couple of knock-down furniture pieces to take to school with me, which I'll try to put in a following post, cause they're kinda cool in their simplicity. But this was the last substantial and complex thing I made before law school. Yeah. That. Anywhoo, I made the body a few years before and it was sitting around staring at me accusingly, so I built it a neck and pillar to go with it. Something that's really cool that you can't see in these pictures is that the soundboard is flamed birch. It has a great ripple all over it!
The story of the body is this - one of my dearest friends had an apprentice who gifted him with a huge board of nice mahogany just before he (the apprentice) passed away. (wow - two harp posts in a row with death involved. That's odd) I cut the big board into usable pieces for him and he gave me some. I made it into one 26 string harp and the body for a 22 string. I still have the 26 string downstairs and unfinished. I'll get to it! Sheesh!
Anyway, I built the neck and pillar for the 22 string to be my own harp, but then another friend in Houston wanted a harp, and I decided since I'm still building the 26 string, I'll just keep it for my own and finish the other for my friend. So I did.
If you compare this harp with the previous one I posted about (which is actually an older body but newer neck and pillar) you'll see that the pillar in this older design was waaaay more curved. I stopped doing that with the maple and bubinga harp mainly because I couldn't fit that big curve onto the wood I had available, but now I think I like it better. So I'll keep doing it. Or not doing it. Or - yeah.
Note also that the head to neck joint is flat. I'm a big fan of the new radiused idea that I incorporated into the maple and bubinga harp.
Here's a crappy picture of the dovetailed pillar support I was talking about earlier. The support is far less likely to pull away from the base. It's all done by hand, so it's a little time consuming (because I'm not yet great at dovetails), but in this case it worked well. I'll also continue doing that in future harps.
Anyway, so there you have it. This is essentially a transitional model. It's mostly a mark 2 design, but the dovetail and the way I attached the neck and pillar are definitely mark 3.
(for the curious, the joint to the neck and pillar have always been a bit of a problem. Attaching them and getting clamping pressure on such a weird shaped joint was difficult and I tried many things. Then all at once two ideas hit me - one was that I saw a picture of Dusty Strings necks and pillars, and they were all oddly shaped. Then I realized that they had the same problem and they just cut them out with essentially parts jutting out that allowed for clamping. Then they cut the neck and pillar to final shape after the joint was solid. But the other idea was that instead of a simple doweled tenon holding the neck and pillar together, I could use a draw bore tenon to actually DRAW the two together and hold them tightly as they dried. So I'm using both ideas - I'm only finishing the mating surfaces of the joint, and then I'm gluing and pegging and draw boring the thing together. Then I trim the neck and pillar as one piece and final sand from there.)
This is the last thing I finished before truckin' off to law school in 2006. Actually - no, I made a couple of knock-down furniture pieces to take to school with me, which I'll try to put in a following post, cause they're kinda cool in their simplicity. But this was the last substantial and complex thing I made before law school. Yeah. That. Anywhoo, I made the body a few years before and it was sitting around staring at me accusingly, so I built it a neck and pillar to go with it. Something that's really cool that you can't see in these pictures is that the soundboard is flamed birch. It has a great ripple all over it!
The story of the body is this - one of my dearest friends had an apprentice who gifted him with a huge board of nice mahogany just before he (the apprentice) passed away. (wow - two harp posts in a row with death involved. That's odd) I cut the big board into usable pieces for him and he gave me some. I made it into one 26 string harp and the body for a 22 string. I still have the 26 string downstairs and unfinished. I'll get to it! Sheesh!
Anyway, I built the neck and pillar for the 22 string to be my own harp, but then another friend in Houston wanted a harp, and I decided since I'm still building the 26 string, I'll just keep it for my own and finish the other for my friend. So I did.
If you compare this harp with the previous one I posted about (which is actually an older body but newer neck and pillar) you'll see that the pillar in this older design was waaaay more curved. I stopped doing that with the maple and bubinga harp mainly because I couldn't fit that big curve onto the wood I had available, but now I think I like it better. So I'll keep doing it. Or not doing it. Or - yeah.
Note also that the head to neck joint is flat. I'm a big fan of the new radiused idea that I incorporated into the maple and bubinga harp.
Here's a crappy picture of the dovetailed pillar support I was talking about earlier. The support is far less likely to pull away from the base. It's all done by hand, so it's a little time consuming (because I'm not yet great at dovetails), but in this case it worked well. I'll also continue doing that in future harps.
Anyway, so there you have it. This is essentially a transitional model. It's mostly a mark 2 design, but the dovetail and the way I attached the neck and pillar are definitely mark 3.
(for the curious, the joint to the neck and pillar have always been a bit of a problem. Attaching them and getting clamping pressure on such a weird shaped joint was difficult and I tried many things. Then all at once two ideas hit me - one was that I saw a picture of Dusty Strings necks and pillars, and they were all oddly shaped. Then I realized that they had the same problem and they just cut them out with essentially parts jutting out that allowed for clamping. Then they cut the neck and pillar to final shape after the joint was solid. But the other idea was that instead of a simple doweled tenon holding the neck and pillar together, I could use a draw bore tenon to actually DRAW the two together and hold them tightly as they dried. So I'm using both ideas - I'm only finishing the mating surfaces of the joint, and then I'm gluing and pegging and draw boring the thing together. Then I trim the neck and pillar as one piece and final sand from there.)