Finished my handmade hiiu kannel / jouhikko / talharpa!
Started working on it sometime last spring and finally got to the point of stringing it today! No power tools were used (at least, after I bought the wood... I’m sure the boards were cut with power saws lol). Just hand saws, hand drill and reamer, hand planes and rasps, knife, files, and sandpaper.
(It did not actually take 8+ months of work; it was very sporadic, due to waiting for various materials and waiting for my wrist to heal after I fucked it up hand-sawing two inches of hard maple into the proper shape, then rinse and repeat a couple times.)
(Also, I should note that I roughly followed plans and instructions from Michael J. King, and I can recommend those as being very helpful!)
Materials: the body is hard maple, the backboard is black walnut, the soundboard, bassboard, and soundpost are spruce, the endpin is antler, the tailpiece is ash wood, and the bridge is cherrywood. Strings are black mongolian horsehair. The bow is... a curved stick of mystery wood that @schaudwen found for me, which I steamed and bent a little more XD Also strung with horsehair. The pegs and fine-tuners are storebought violin parts. Finish is black walnut danish oil for everything but the tailpiece and bridge. The bridge is bare wood, and for the tailpiece, I used a woodburning pen to draw on some Urnes-style decoration before simply varnishing it.
I learned so much in the process of making this instrument, and I absolutely love how rustic-looking it came out. I feel like you wouldn’t look a bit out of place chilling in the northern woods a thousand years ago playing this thing. XD
I still need to properly tune it and rosin up the bow, so I don’t yet know definitively how it sounds. But I fuckin love it already.
