a blog by Peter Leonard
The instrument on the left above is French luthier Jean-Claude Condi’s modern interpretation of the Moraharpa, a Swedish instrument first attested in the 1300s. A more traditional Moraharpa is on the right.
Let’s step into Jean-Claude’s atelier in Mirecourt, in the French province of Lorraine, to see how long it take to make a modern key fiddle by hand.
We’ll start with this pile of random scrap wood on the floor:
In one of the few concessions to modernity, the keys which press against the strings have been roughly shaped by a computer-aided woodworking tool — but they’ll still need to be finished by hand:
First we’ll trace the exterior outline of the instrument’s template onto the large block of wood:
Then we’ll do a rough cut of the shape, along the pencil-drawn line, with a bandsaw:
After cutting, this nifty rotating sander will make the edges of the instrument nice and smooth:
Now it’s time to plane the surfaces to create an even smoother finish. Very tricky to get the razor-sharp blade to be the exact distance above the surface of the wood. Adjusting this involves hitting one of two metal parts with a hammer.
After the planing, there’s a more extreme step which involves a piece of metal, sharpened to a point on one edge, that acts as a scraper:
Of course, these tools work best on the long, sloping sides of the body, and can’t get very close to the tight corners. So for these areas, we’ll use a chisel to get rid of excess wood:
The “tête,” or head, of the instrument, is much thinner than the rest of the body — it’s about the same size and shape as the head of a guitar. So we’ll need to cut out quite a bit of wood to get there:
This special sanding platform helps us form the tête:
Now for a big step forward: We need to turn this block of wood into a hollow shell that will reverberate with sound. First, we need to put a few holes into the body of the wood, to allow us to turn the band-saw in tight corners:
In order to cut out the inside of the instrument, we’ll take the bandsaw in through the top (We’ll glue this seam back together later.) Then we’ll use one of the holes we drilled to rotate the wood around the vibrating saw blade.
This is just about as nerve-wracking as it looks:
The end result? Happily, a complete instrument shell — and still five fingers on each hand:
Now, to glue the one side together. We’ll put these two screws in, temporarily, on both sides of the instrument, to create a place to wrap string around to hold the two pieces together, like a clamp:
Here goes the glue — animal-based, so it can be removed if necessary later for repairing the instrument:
Now to let the glue set overnight. Coming tomorrow: Four straight hours of rasping!