a blog by Peter Leonard
After a half-day of work on Sunday, followed by a brief trip to relax in Nancy, we're back in the workshop Monday to see take off the clamps and see how the body came out:
Great! Now we have something that looks like a middle-school reënactment of Scream:
In order to get this looking more like a polished instrument, we're going to need to round off the corners using a progression of tools, from rough to very fine. We'll start by rasping the edges to curve:
We'll also scrape down the front face with a sharp metal sheet:
Then it's time to rub down the wooden bodies with a wet sponge -- this causes the wood to expand very slightly. We'll set them outside to dry:
Once the bodies have dried, we need to decided what color we want them to be. The shade is determined by two factors: the stain itself, and then the wax we put on top of it. Here's a sample of the available stains:
As it turns out, all four of us chose the stain on the far left, so we didn't get a chance to see how the different stains would turn out in comparison to each other. Here's Jean-Claude applying the mixture:
And here's Sofie with her four-row keyboarded instrument:
Then it's back to the garden for another round of drying:
Finally, we'll apply protective wax with a brush:
Coming up next: the endless saga of key-sanding.