Making top for a hammered Dulcimer

[David Knutson]

Hi All! I'm in the process of building my first instrument - a hammered dulcimer. My woodworking skills are maybe a bit beyond beginner and I'm working from a plan from Folkcraft, which calls for the top to be 1/4-in thick and made from spruce, pine or redwood.

I decided to make mine from western cedar as I had some very well aged planks laying around. I'm limited in power tools - really just have a table saw. I used that to resaw the planks for the top and that worked fairly well. I've glued up the panel and am now ready to plane/sand it down - the surface is a bit rough from the saw. My question is - how flat does the top need to be? It is nice and flat now, but it does have ripples across the surface, not very obvious, but you can see slivers of light in places when I lay a straight edge across it. Is that going to be a problem?

Also, the plan calls for 1/4-in top. My top is currently almost 3/8-in. Is that too thick? Not sure how I would go about getting down to 1/4-in and keeping it flat as my plane skills are not that good yet.

[Barry Daniels]

You might call around and see if any cabinet shops have an abrasive planer that could handle your top. Shouldn't cost that much. And 3/8" is definitely too thick.

[Clay Schaeffer]

Western red cedar can be left a little thicker than spruce and dents more easily. If you can't locate someone with a wide belt or drum sander, you could thin the soundboard on it's underside with a hand plane and sander where divots and gouges won't be seen. 5/16ths inch thick should be O.K.

[David Knutson]

Thanks!

[Mike Conner]

Since you have a table saw, and assuming you also have a dado blade set for it:
- Use the dado set to mill off the 1/8 or so you are removing in series of passes, leaving strips or ridges at the original height. This gives you a really good target for handplaning the ridges down to the thickess target.
- Red cedar planes and sands pretty easy. Watch out for knots - the area around the knots will have varied grain directions and more prone to tearout.
- The sandpaper will tend to load up more than pine or spruce.
//mike