2012 Harp slideshow

Ditterich Harp from Robert Ditterich on Vimeo.

The label  'harp making' in this blog has more than a dozen posts about the making of this particular harp. I wanted to bring it all together for the family that commissioned the instrument, and for me to have a simple record of the process. While I'm spending time on house renovations I find it is a good opportunity to reorganise and consolidate my record of things that have been enjoyable- particularly since others have expressed pleasure at seeing the process unfold.

It often shows multiple images so I do recommend a full screen viewing.

blackwood harp

It was a pleasure, once again, to  make a small contribution to the Colac Otway Wood Design Exhibition at Colac Performing Arts Centre recently. The family that own the harp featured in this blog some time ago kindly allowed me to borrow it back for the display. It was great to see it again, still in very good order after more than a year of daily playing.

the harp gets some wings

 I couldn't finish the story of this harp without some close-ups of Betty Truitt's lovely levers. The ones standing out of order are the B and E levers because, of course these strings don't 'get sharp'- so they  start off as naturals and lever down to be flats.

I have to admit that this final fitting took me an unseemly amount of time, and I certainly have come to respect people who set these things up on a regular basis. There is an uncanny amount of detail and precision in the design, layout and placement of these fittings.

I must also reiterate how wonderful the design work in this harp is, and that is all down to Rick Kemper- who is, I suspect, much more of a 'details man' than I am, and has gone to enormous lengths to share the fruits of his considerable efforts. I would have made some pretty fundamental errors without his expertise as a spring-board.

I'm excited to have made this for a particular family too, and I just hope that it fulfills its mission elegantly and without any glitches. It was a great relief when the strings first went up to tension- I could feel every joint and surface that I had assembled being strained and tested, and the tension was unbearable as the pitch got higher and implosion seemed to my little brain to be inevitable, but it all just settled and coped.

need some string

 All dressed up and nowhere to go. I had undertaken to have the instrument ready for this Friday (the client's birthday) and despite a slow patch back there, everything seemed to be coming together on time and on budget.

The tip from Rick to get beautiful sharping levers from Betty Truitt allowed me to 'meet' another passionate and energetic advocate for her craft. Betty markets harp gear in general, but her patent levers not only seem to be of exceptional design, they look great too. Her bundle of hardware, including bridge pins, eyelets, reamers, tuning pegs and levers arrived within four days of her order being sent from the good old US of A. All beautifully packed and labelled. Great service and wonderful attention to detail.

I felt it prudent to find a good supplier of strings within Australia, because the harp will need replacements from time to time, but my enquiry, order and payment from early last week has not born fruit yet. So the harp sits waiting. I should have ordered earlier, of course, but everything else just seemed to happen as if by magic, and I was  so focussed on finishing each little detail I didn't get my head around the niceties of which string at what thickness over what length, wrapped in whatever wrapping, by whichever manufacturer.

The problem is that the levers can't go on until the strings have settled in and the instrument has relaxed into a new, musical shape.

 Finishing the woodwork before fitting the hardware necessitated careful handling during the drilling process. Here the bench has been made into an extension table for the little drill press by clamping the press in the end vise, checking for square carefully. It worked a treat and was a comfortable process, if a little tedious!

 Fitting the pegs was more challenging than I had anticipated because unlike violin pegs, these are steel and cannot be adjusted like the hole can, so neat lengths were not easy.

The string holes along the soundboard are reinforced with brass eyelets.

ready for hardware

 These pics cover the polishing and finally assembly in readiness for the fit-out. The bottom of the pillar has been bolted to the soundboard to test angles and fits. The neck and soundboard will still need to be drilled for the bridge pins, tuning pegs, sharping levers and string eyelets. These holes could have been done before oiling but since the hardware isn't here yet, I pushed on regardless.

The wooden peg shown above is not a functional thing- if anything it is a design affectation, and my attempt to make the joint between neck and soundbox look better by providing a point of emphasis where the strong taper and converging lines of the soundbox suddenly intersect with the round knob of the the neck base. I tried a few different shapes there and ultimately felt that a peg worked best to allow the neck curves to sprout happily from the box.

 Here the whole caboodle is propped in the shoulder vise to access the base for the spanner job on the lag bolt. You can see from these pics that the timber changes color a lot when light or angles are changed. This is because of the very strong grain, but it isn't as obvious in reality as it is in photos.

a bit of good oil

 I chose to use boiled Linseed oil as a base, without using fillers to hide timber 'features' and small areas of tear-out. I can't explain why, but it is quite liberating to be free of the traditional restrictions that dictate how a violin should look. This instrument will allow the actual tree to have a bit of ego in the presence of the harp. These pics are of the process of oiling.

back to the harp

 This is a bit of a catch up post, having spent many hours in the 'zone', attending to surfaces more than shapes, but looking below at the oversized lump at the top of the soundbox, there has been a bit of sculpture going on.

 The bulb at the base of the neck was an intimidating project in itself- one of those little jobs that presents more problems in the mind before you actually tackle it, and then it simply becomes a satisfying flurry of woodchips and right-brain flow, sawdust and feeling the shape with very sharp tools, and with a bit of luck and/or experience, you know just when to stop.

The soundboard is glued onto the box, and then secured with covering strips which are themselves glued and screwed...and these are covered with thin strips of matching wood to cover the screws.

Creating the final surfaces for the fit of the neck and pillar to the soundbox is a job best crept up upon rather than attacked with bravado. Rick recommends leaving a small allowance for the movement of the neck wood after compression by the strings, and I have done that, but I needed to be very careful that the slight gap was even enough for the surfaces to bed down without any sideways twist. At this point the top joint is held in position by a pair of positioning dowels, and the bottom joint is just hanging there. When all is well-placed, the bottom end will be secured by a stout coach screw into the base.

It looks as though this instrument will be finished with oil in the timber, rather than coatings over the top. The surface will be less perfect in that wood flaws and surface variations won't be masked, but the timber itself has such authority and integrity I'm not sure I have the will to wrap it. The exception to this is the sound-board, which has had a couple of sealing coats of shellac. Softwoods can look gooey if oiled, and have been known to drink far too much.

a fat slippery joint

 The neck-pillar joint is a tricky, long-mitred, much-end-grained, hard-to-clamp, slippery and very important joint so I took a bit of time to have the two mating surfaces nicely flat and keen to get together. This meant that assembly wasn't about placement or avoiding twist or other distortions, but simply about holding things where they felt comfortable until the glue set. Once you dispose of the need to apply great force to bring things together clamping arrangements can seem less daunting.

Above, the mortices were cut with a router and the tenon is a loose piece of hardwood machined to be a comfortable sliding fit. Note the grain direction on the tenon. The cross grain will resist splitting across the joint.

It all went together well and is held by four blocks, which are clamped to the work while another clamp on each face provides compression between the blocks. This provided enough pressure to close the joint and squeeze out enough thickened glue to satisfy me that the joints were fully wet. I used epoxy for this one, applied thin- especially in plenty around all that end-grain, allowing it to soak in before applying thickened stuff liberally.

a particular sort of thing

 It is a particular gift to have someone invest in you, and this little harp project has involved a lovely bit of that. Despite my urgings and my research, the clients for this harp- who could have so easily sourced a cheaply produced imported harp- chose instead to pay more for something built especially with them in mind. They trusted me with their story and have trusted me also with their money, to come up with a unique object that will add something to their lives in a way that a product simply couldn't. This is increasingly rare.

Most people have been fooled into believing that simply having stuff is the same as valuing it. That getting a new thing will be as satisfying as keeping one that is good in and of itself. Things don't cut it. We live to be connected to stories. We need to feel connected to our needs, not just indulged in them. This isn't necessarily a spiritual need, in my opinion it is a genetic truth that is ignored by those who wish simply to treat us as markets.

So to have someone ask you to make a beautiful thing, capable of nurturing more than just their physical needs is the most important of missions to undertake, and I do so gratefully.

The other side of this is what happened when I researched my mission, and got in touch with a person who seemed to have  complimentary values to mine. A bit like the first email I shared with 'Doryman', my contact with Rick at Sligo harps made me feel connected with a generous spirit whose enthusiasm was shared in up-sized lashings, and that mutual respect was the only currency required in the transactions that followed. This is worth bottling. It runs completely counter to current 'best-practice' in business. Rick has put so much technical experience out there for free, and he gave me even more simply on the strength of his enjoyment of this blog. How much money would we need to earn to gain the sort of satisfaction that comes from that? I wouldn't bother even trying.

Anyway, I haven't been very good at expressing these quite subtle things lately, and I thought I should see if I could squeeze out a few of the sentiments that used to come a bit more fluently than they have for the last few months.

The pics relate to my fabricating a Western Red Cedar soundboard- that has cross grain structure, and is 1/8 of an inch thick at the treble end and 1/4 of an inch at the bass end, and if you thought the sound-box back was vulnerable you should pick this little treasure up and see it wobble helplessly about.

The other pic shows my roughing out of a rebate to take four laminations of bent hardwood that will reinforce the most vulnerable part of the neck- it is most likely to break along the shortest grain, so the laminations will give plenty of long-grain strength where it is most needed. These harp strings do generate big stresses.

resolving the back of a harmonic box

Finally, this harmonic cone has me by the hair. It's good to have a creative problem beckoning, and I'm just now entering the 'flow zone'- where an unfamiliar set of problems is unfolding, but enough is coming together to tickle the right-brain cells into imagining the next phase with some excitement.

Above, the cone has been cleaned up a little, and although it is amazingly tough, the shape is at it's most vulnerable stage.

Below, the unit sits in the cradle being set up for the angled base and cap. These angles are pretty important and the fit is complex so I ended up making a jig based on Rick Kemper's one, and I found it very handy to check symmetry, and angles in all directions while fitting the 'bulkheads', and then when gluing them.

In the pic below, one of the linings are being glued in after the central bracing 'bulkhead' has been fabricated to fit between the middle and lower sound holes- and these were just cut and left rough at this stage.

And here the sound box leans provocatively on the jointer inviting me to enjoy the angles, staves, facets and taper. Those holes are still rough, and will be faired with knives and birdsmouth files when I'm in a mood for finer, more focussed work. The off-cut from the base angle can be seen on the saw bwnch behind the jointer- one of the more enchanting of off-cuts...I wonder what I could do...

making a tall dalek

The acoustic box behind the soundboard of this harp will be made from 10 staves, each having two tapered, angled edges. Re-sawing the 4 inch square board was done on the bandsaw, taking the boards down to a generous 10mm thick, for thicknessing to about 7mm.

 The tool for ripping the tapers is a fairly simple jig that holds a board while cutting the line obliquely. Given that we are trying to make over 40 feet of joints from over 80 feet of tapered, angled edges, to specific dimensions, the jig needs to be fairly accurate.

The tape holds the edges together while they are being glued and the whole caboodle sits in a cradle to hold it to the correct dimensions while the glue sets. This is a carvel hulled harp box!

planing out the bumps

 The harp pillar, fresh from the bandsaw, is having it's curve 'faired' with hand planes and this is the first time the wood has had the opportunity to show itself in all it's Tasmanian glory. This is quite dense for blackwood, but it still has a buttery feel under the blade, and it sparkles and shines as the surface becomes more refined.

Below is a lovely image of Lombok, captured by my daughter. We three had a marvellous time in perfect Autumnal sun on Saturday. He was led, fed, indulged, cuddled, bathed and then he rolled in some dirt out of sheer sensual pleasure.

getting wood flat; harping but not humming

 I finally began the transformation of some big lumps of timber into suitably dimensioned smaller lumps that can soon be made into components for the harp. I have chosen some Tasmanian Blackwood in boards about 65mm deep.

 The piece, above, for the pillar had a significant twist in it. The 'winding sticks' clamped to it show just how much. It took a great deal of care to bring it flat without making it too thin.

The neck here is taking shape, but this stuff is mean on machines and I had to treat my trusty old bandsaw to a brand new 6ppi blade.

There are so many things happening at the moment, I find it hard to get any sort of 'flow' into any particular thing that I do, so I'm just trudging through the heavy work as time permits, so that when my mind is in the right place and the old creative juices finally start, I'll be in a position to do some finer work. Those same juices (or the lack of them) explain the absence of any writing lately too...