MIMF

Here is a marquetry jewellery box I made for my daughter. complete with secret drawer. Cheers, Bob IMG_1719 (300x193).jpg IMG_1720 (300x191).jpg IMG_1721 (285x300).jpg IMG_1723 (300x225).jpg IMG_1725 (300x225).jpg Nice work Bob. I used to do this for a living so I know what's involved. Barry

Sometimes I have found that even quarter sawn wood will cup after resawing simply because the interior moisture level is different from the outside. To correct, I simply lay them on the cement floor of my shop, concave down , with some weight to hold them in place for a few days. This has never fail...

If air dried is available I would go for it. When I retired from building furniture for a living I ended up with quite a bit of wood which had been stickered on my racks for up to 18 years. Since then I have used it in projects along with freshly purchased kiln dried and have noticed a huge differen...

On my Pimpard hg I made the tangents from hard maple and attached them to the key bars with 2 X 56 pan headed machine screws which allowed them to be adjusted quite easily. I think for the sake of practicality I'll do the same thing on the Varquain. I want it to have a period look however I do also ...

Thanks for the response Yuri. Fiber resin board used to be used a lot as an insulator in high voltage applications and sometimes for printed circuit boards. It's usually medium brown colour and looks like fabric sheets glued together with some kind of fibreglass resin and is relatively dense/heavy. ...

The Varquain style hurdy gurdy that I am currently building is shown in the drawing as having a 1/2" thick wheel. I would like to try using some fibre resin board for the wheel as it is very stable however the nearest thickness that I can find is thinner, closer to 1 cm. Does anyone know whethe...

Thanks, the fret calculator is a big help.

Thanks John. Now I just need to find out what that 'fraction' is. I guess I could find a guitar, measure the distance from nut to the closest fret and calculate the fraction myself.

I am planning to build another hg now that my Pimpard is in the hands of my musician son and apparently not a complete failure and waste of pretty wood. This time I am going to make a copy of a Varquain guitar shaped one with a few modifications. I know nothing about music and so before I begin, I w...

I'm not musically inclined either so I gave the hurdy gurdy that I just finished to my son. He is a musician so it's his problem now

I'm guessing that you were able to view it Charlie. I have to say that I am pretty pleased with the way it turned out, considering it is my first instrument and to be honest, I had no idea that it would be playable at all. However in 20 minutes my son Jeff had got it tuned and played that short piec...

Ok, here goes. Let me know if this works.

Charlie it's a video file 2.3 MB. We probably should have made a separate audio file, but it never occurred to me, and now the hg is with my son, back in Vancouver.

My son finally was able to visit and get the hg to produce a kind of tune. This was his first attempt and i had no idea that it would take three people to play it :). Hopefully I can upload this little video as proof. I am anxious to hear what people think of my first attempt at building an instrume...

It looks great to me and the wood looks a lot nicer than I would find in a scrap bin at my local home depot.

I am having trouble finding strings for my hg locally so I decided to try some tennis racquet gut for strings, if I could find any. It turns out that no one around stocks it due to the shelf life issue, but I did get some stuff that is a 'gut substitute' that re-stringers use. it's just over 1.2 mm ...

Hi Charlie, just wondering what strings you used on your hg?

I am settled now on Vancouver Island and need to get this hg finished. I decided to french polish the main parts. In the past I have mixed the shellac flakes with denatured alcohol, but I couldn't find that here and was advised that methyl hydrate would work just as well. I think I was misinformed b...

Nice job Charlie.
Seeing your pictures is making me anxious to get on and finish mine but thats not going to happen until I purchase a new home here in Comox BC.
So how does it play?

Well, I have applied a couple of 'coats' of blonde shellac to my HG as per our discussion in Charlie's HG topic, and it's now ready for a light sanding and polishing. Meanwhile my house has sold and I must put it away again until we get settled in a new home which we have yet to find in the Comox Va...