Final touches

I've been playing the completed instrument for about a week now, and it's sounding better every day. It has a tendency to drift flat, especially in the upper registers, so I've been spending a lot of time tuning it -- I expect that it'll hold pitch better once the strings have stretched out and the rails settle into their final positions.

More pictures of the final product at: http://www.renaker.com/harpsichord/

It's a very different experience, playing a harpsichord where I know every string personally. It's actually rather difficult to practice on at this point, because it's hard to focus on the music rather than the mechanics of the instrument, and I keep stopping every other minute to tune a note or adjust a damper.

More voicing and keyboard adjustment will definitely be necessary at some point, but I'm going to wait a few months for that.

The end is near

114 strings, 114 jacks, 114 quills and 114 dampers. They're all in, though at times it seemed like it was going to take forever...I can't even imagine what building a 2-manual instrument must be like. I had to start sanding with my left hand, because my right forearm was starting to wear out.



Once all the jacks were cut to size, I put in the quills, then trimmed the quills into the correct shape. That took a few days. Then I cut the damper felt, put in the dampers, and voila, I had a working harpsichord. All that was left was a few odds and ends, such as screwing the hinges back on the lid and flap, and gluing on the buff stop pads.

The buff stop pad felt is a rather garish red.



With the lid on, the whole thing looks rather handsome:




But the burning question is, how does it sound? Right now, unfortunately, pretty terrible. But that's how new harpsichords are supposed to sound. Until the soundboard loosens up and settles in, until the strings mellow out and the quills get into shape, it's going to sound like a cheap ukelele. Lots of breaking in, that's what it needs, probably several months' worth. So the next step will be to move it out of the garage and into the house.

New jack city

A small city of jacks is springing up in the registers. Getting the registers in the right place was quite tricky, and drilling the holes in the wrestplank for the stop-lever fulcrums was almost disastrous. The wrestplank is such solid oak that screws tend to snap in the middle when you insert them, and even when I finally got them right they're sticking up a bit, which looks ugly but still works.

The jacks themselves are another project like the strings, 114 chances to mess something up. I expect to take a few more days cutting and sanding the jacks, then a few more days after that voicing the quills and installing the dampers, then the whole thing is just about done. The end is in sight.

Front end finished

The keyboard is now really done, with the touchrail installed and the keys as level as I could make them (not perfectly level, but pretty close).



I picked up the nameplate from the guy I hired to do the lettering, and the lettering looks nice, but it's a bit bigger than I envisioned. I should have specified 1/2" letters instead of 3/4"...oh well.



So that's the front end. All that's left is the hardest part -- the action. Next step, putting pins in the nut to guide the strings over the registers correctly. Touchy stuff, and I hope I'm doing it right.

Strung out

The strings are now strung, and I'm going to let the case and soundboard adjust to the tension for awhile before starting work on the action. The stringing was a pretty long and arduous process -- at an average of 5 minutes per string, it took almost 10 hours to do all 114. The first few took a lot more than 5 minutes, and the last few somewhat less. The first few tuning pins I did look pretty horrible -- it took me a while to get the hang of wrapping the wire around them neatly. If there's enough wire left over, I might go back and re-do some of the uglier ones.

Seahorses ahoy

The Flemish papers are now fully installed. I put the seahorse-patterned paper in the keywell today, and made some repairs on the jackrail; I took a strip left over from the inside case and put it in the middle over the misaligned pieces, and it looks better, if not perfect. The big seahorse strips of paper were very unwieldy -- once the glue is brushed on their backs, they curl up forcefully and it's tough to lay them flat, especially when trying to line them up exactly.

Only time will heal the paint

OK, it's time to declare victory, or defeat, or something, and call a halt to major painting operations. My workshop used to smell pleasantly of oak, spruce, and pine; now it's a noxious fog of paint, varnish, and denatured alcohol. I could probably go on fixing paint flaws large and small for another month, but I want to get on with the keyboard and the action.

The final coat on the inside flap:



Per tradition, I painted the keyboard end blocks and the transposing blocks black:





The keywell has several strips of wood which require black trim, and those areas gave me fits. There's no way to mask effectively over the small ridges of the moldings, and it would require a steadier hand than I've got to paint the necessary sharp lines freehand.



Before moving on to the next phase of construction, there's one more aspect of decoration to take care of; the Flemish papers which go around the keywell and the inside of the case above the rails. This turned out to be trickier than I thought, but it was still easy and fun compared to the rigors of oil painting.

First I trimmed the papers down to the correct size and shape:



Then I started papering the inside of the case, using thinned glue.



The end result is pretty nice, but I messed up the jackrail, unfortunately. These papers are hand-printed from wooden blocks, which is billed as a feature, but which actually means that the lines wander all over the place, and it's quite hard to cut them so that they match up, and on the jackrail I did a poor job lining up the stripes, and the two pieces meet at a very obvious place in the middle. The jackrail will be mostly hidden by the music desk, anyway.