Cool Tools!

I've been working on major sanding on and off through the crazy weeks of Passover and finals. I covered most of the harp body, but had some issues with the bottom of the harp where there was some excess wood protruding from the soundboard and the backboard. I sawed of most of it with Eitan's suave little hand saw, but there was some wood I couldn't really reach with the saw. Tried sanding it by hand but realized it's going to take me forever. Engineer to the rescue: Brian Rosen came over with his rotary tool kit. I totally love this rotary tool! If you're into building instruments, or really anything that needs precise sanding in weird nooks and corners, I recommend investing in a good rotary tool. We also dealt with some nails that were protruding through the bottom of the harp (yeah, I know, stupid mistake of mine) - shaved them off with the rotary tool.

Naftali said I should post this picture of me with the mask I improvised (yeah, don't worry, I now have safety goggles and a mask):

Here's Brian experimenting:

Next thing we did was attach the pillar/neck to the harp body. We needed to leave some space between the soundboard and the pillar, but not over 1/8''. Brian put a folded piece of paper between the pillar and the soundboard to keep it from moving too close when it was being screwed to the base:

And her'es the harp looking like an actual harp! Tada!

Stay tuned for next time (Brian Levine, that was for you...)! We have more sanding to do, and then decorating. In the meantime, I am experimenting with different mediums of decorating - carving, woodburning and painting and how they look with finish applied.

Soundboard Art

I finished the soundboard art this week and glued the soundboard to the soundchamber:

I also sanded the neck and pillar, they are super smooth now (I used 600 grit sandpaper for the finishing). I have to finish nailing the bottom of the soundboard to the soundchamber, trim it, and sand the whole thing. After that, it's finishing, one last screw, and hardware! Wow!

And now for something different

I'm pausing the woodworking for a bit to finish decorating the soundboard before I install it. I've been working the past two weeks on penciling the design and then painting it. My sister Yael recomended I use watercolors, and indeed they work well with the wood grain.

here are some pictures of the work in progress:

It's ok to make mistakes!

I made a little mistake this week while glueing the pieces I had been working on with Michael. When I glued them together and rescrewed them they didn't fit perfectly (I guess we needed Michael's super powers for that!). The glue had dried already before I decided I wasn't happy with the fit, but yesterday I managed to unscrew, poke and prod a bit with my knife, and take it apart. I sanded off the dry glue and reattached the pieces. This time with the help of the mighty powers of Lauren Kane :)

I didn't realy have weights to place on it so I kind of pushed down and practicaly SAT on it until the glue set. I guess we can say I am building this the Jewish Mother way. No Ilan, I am not drawing gefilte fish on the soundboard, get back to your work!

Speaking of soundboard artwork, I am in the proccess of sanding it (I am debating - how do you know that you have sanded enough?). I think I am going for some sort of pomegrant tree motif, either in acrilics or oils. Probably should ask my Mom about this (Hi Imma!)



After that, I will need to figure out if I want to do anything with the sides and the neck/pillar or just leave them plain.

This is somewhat unrelated, but on Motzaei Shabbat Morgan and I got to sing and play two songs with Ilana Shechter at her "Music from the Soul" performance at the Women's Resource Center. It was such an amazing experience! I can't wait to see how the new harp will sound and

jam with you girls! k

Lots of sawdust

Michael Lavin was here today with his nifty screwdriver. We drilled the holes for the strings on the soundboard, that was easy:

We had figured out how all the parts of the sounchamber fit together so we now had to drill through the top two holes of the top peice sideways into the side panels. I told Michael that he should probably do that. We aligned everything, it looked well, he drilled through , but the screw didn't want to play nice. ok, fine, we'll start with the other side.

I thought that it would actualy make sense to start with screwing the base of the harp into the sides, so that would give us some stability. That worked well.

We then screwed the other side to the top: this time we drilled through the top, then took it off and drilled through the whole into the side peice so that the drill could reach deeper, put the top piece back on and hoped that the screw would go in. It did!

Now to the first screw we started with - we figured we'll do the same for this one: drill through, take off top piece, drill deeper through the wood. I also sanded the top piece so it will be smoother and allign better. we drilled through it again, and with a little back-and forth unscrewing and rescrewing it worked!

We utilized Naftali to hold the wood pieces together:

(Naftali is wondering what's wrong with knitting or writing that I decided to take on woodworking. "Wait? you're writing a BLOG about it? That is so DORKY!!!!!!" Well, at least I didn't listen to Roxette and Backstreet boys when I was in high school, so there you go.)

Here is the finished soundchamber:

Now I have to ease the screws out a little so I can actualy glue it....WAH

I'm still thinking of designs to paint on the soundboard. Any ideas?

The harp kit is here!

If you know me, you are aware that I am quite obssesed with folk harps and realy want to build one. Well, my little dream of three years is now in the making, Baruch Hashem :)
I am building a wire strung lap harp from Musicmakers http://www.harpkit.com/
It's going to have a walnut body and an aircraft birch soundboard.

The kit arrived a few hours before Shabbos, this is what it looked like:






















I checked to see that all the soundchamber parts fit together:






















Motzaei Shabbat I called around to see who has a drill, Michael is going to save the day :)
Since I'll only get a drill tommorow I figured I might as well work a little on the soundboard. So I sanded the soundboard and its reinforcment bar and glued them together, like this:

I figured I can use a small square brush to spread the glue. That worked well.

Brian Rosen and Steven Rosenberg were very nice and let me use some clamps. I borrowed the wooden blocks from my kids (kids are very generous after you make them a triple delux banana split).

I'm probably making a million mistakes, but so far so good!