#instrument making

[prenbyw]

Not my usual thing (spoons), but I finally managed to fulfil my dream of making a lyre.

The body is oak, the soundboard elm and the bridge hornbeam, all locally sourced.

[earhartsease]

we wanted to write something about boxwood instruments, because boxwood is beautiful - very fine grained and dense and stable and a little oily, which makes very smooth wood turning possible - and modern makers who make copies of old instruments have an interesting conundrum

so the instruments above are renaissance columnar recorders, and a baroque oboe, and modern makers love to go to museums and measure up old instruments for copying

and this is weirdly easier with renaissance than baroque instruments, even though the former are older - and the reason why is that over a couple of hundred years, the seasoning of boxwood took a major turn for the worse

in the older days, the way you'd season boxwood billets for instrument making was you'd turn to a rough round, and bore a hole down the centre - and then you'd stick these billets in a pile of horseshit for 20 years - and then you'd stick them in a running stream for another 20 years - and then the wood would be so fucking stable that you can find sound examples of instruments from 700 years ago

but then people started wanting their wood faster and cheaper, so the good seasoning got dropped in favour of other methods - and so instruments that are 400-500 years old and still in any kind of good enough shape to reliably copy are much rarer, because the newer ones split and cracked and warped

so if your boxwood hasn't been in the shit it's worth shit (of course modern seasoning methods are much better than the baroque methods were but still)

[whittleandwind]

A technical drawing of a Flageolett, done by hand on A3 paper This part shows the head as a half-cut. A half-cut is used to show the exterior and the interior of an instrument. It helps to understand how it was built and gives more details when recreating said instrument. Four different types of hatching indicate different materials. The vertical freehand lines indicate wood (the different densities indicate two different pieces of wood). The straight horizontal lines indicate ivory and the horizontal freehand lines indicate thread winding used on the joints. The least used hatching is diagonal from top left to bottom right. This one is usually used to indicate metal

drawing done by me about two years ago (2023)

[the-raven-that-refused-to-sing]

Golden wood shavings 🧡

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

mods asleep time to post hole

flute #2 is done! still flat af, but sound quality has improved a lot and has the beautiful woody sound! this was made at my uni's makerspace using bamboo i found growing next to a bus stop.

[abutchknits]

And it's finally done. Just have a skosh more sanding to do and then some varnish, but otherwise it's ready to go. P chuffed with myself

[classicalconditioningblog]

double chromatic harp (c. 1895) made by henry greenway (1833-1903) in brooklyn.

little is known about greenway, other than that he was a civil war veteran turned piano repairman and instrument-maker. only two harps by greenway survive. this one would have been difficult to play, with glissandi in any key other than c major completely impossible.

(via Metropolitan Museum of Art)

[ghostfairystims]

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