Day 67: Getting Ready for the Sharp Tops

I purchased some Titebond Hide Glue today. Whether it's as good as traditional hide (yes, made from the hides of animals) chips melted in a glue pot remains to be seen. All reviews I was able to find on the Interwebs were favorable and this is one of the questions I will be asking Owen Daly when I visit his shop in February.

The reason I'm switching to hide glue for the key tops is that once the glue is dry, I can heat it and it will soften up enough to remove a top without going all drama queen and slicing it off using Little Buddy (my 12" band saw). The glue will also adhere to itself. By this, I mean that, should I separate a top from a key, I would not need to sand the surfaces completely clean to reglue them as I would with, say, Titebond II yellow wood glue. Wet hide glue sticks to dry hide glue without the extra cleaning step, though I would sand things up a bit to get a good fit.

Hide glue is used pretty extensively by violin/viola/cello luthiers and others such as harpsichord builders who occasionally have the need to take instruments apart for maintenance purposes. I wish I had used this glue on all of the keys. I was able to get the natural key tops measured, cut and glued for keys 20 and 51 using it, which is a good experiment to see how it holds up after drying. Hopefully, I won't need to remove either of them in the near future.

Once I clamped up 20 and 51, I was free to move on to cutting the key top laminates for the sharps. As you may recall, this instrument is in the Arts & Crafts/Craftsman style, so I'm using quarter sawn red oak for the case, legs, bench, and sharp key tops and African blackwood for the naturals and other accents. I recently purchased a nice Thin Rip Table Saw Jig from Rockler Woodworking and Hardware that allows me to cut at 1/16" and 1/8" inch intervals with ease, and it's astonishingly accurate.

Using this new jig with a featherboard allows me to cut the sharp key tops at 1/16" (2mm) with incredible accuracy and safety. Mr. Miller states in his eBook Most Excellent that the sharp tops need to be exact clones because the human eye is able to detect minute differences in them very quickly. In this case, the first step is cutting them at the right height, which I've been able to do here.

Before I could start ripping the tops, I needed to extend the blade slot of my zero clearance table saw throat plate. This type of plate comes with no blade slot, which means you must install it, start the saw, and then slowly and carefully raise the blade to cut through the plate. The result is a clean cut with little to no clearance between the blade and the plate, This is done to prevent thin cuts from falling back into the blade, something that is not only terribly frightening, it's really, really dangerous.

The trouble with the current zero clearance plate was that I had added a riving knife to the saw during the recent Tortuga Early Instruments Holiday Maintenance Program. Because I had cut the plate before that installation, there simply wasn't room to raise the blade and, hence, use this particular plate for safety. Thus, I decided to extend the cut using my trusty scroll saw.

I noticed once I finished that I had set the blade to move so fast (a scroll saw is like a sewing machine with a jigsaw blade, rather than a needle) it melted the plastic and closed up the cut as fast as it made it. Yes, sometimes I worry about me. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the cut was still there, it just needed some of the melted goo to be cleaned out, so I grabbed a fine-toothed hand saw and cleared the path. Once installed back on the table saw, it worked beautifully.

Tomorrow, I will size and shape the sharp key tops in preparation for gluing them to the keys using - you guessed it - hide glue!

Until then...

Day 66: Almost There

I have completed the rounding of all naturals except for keys 20 and 51, both of which need replacement tops; I sliced them off because I ruined a corner of 20 and 51 was a mess from the beginning. I can accomplish this very quickly, get them rounded off and move on to finish sanding them and then installing the quarter sawn red oak key tops on the sharps. Once I decided to go ahead and manually round the keys, it came together in no time. As you can imagine, it got easier and my accuracy increased with each one. I enjoyed the process and am looking forward to the next instrument when I can do this again.

On an unrelated note, I was able to recently procure some white oak and cedar logs in the raw. By raw, I mean dirty-moss-growing-on-them raw. As you can see in the photos below, the cedar was less raw than the oak.

My wife said the oak in the first photo above looked like sticks when I posted them on the project Facebook page. This cracked me up because they are about five feet long and weigh around 300 pounds each, and they're just branches from a tree that took a dive in someone's front yard. I was excited to find them on Craigslist and then considerably less excited loading and unloading them. The second photo above is a mix of white oak and cedar chunks that my father brought over. The cedar was a bit knotty, but I went ahead and made a test cut with Big Bertha, anyway.

Not only did I slice the log in half, I also cut a 1/4" piece from it as a way to test my resaw capabilities. I must say it is a challenging process that requires me to cut pieces thicker than my intended final thickness so I can plane them down to dimension. As I cut them, I used a Kreg Resaw Guide to adjust for blade drift. Yes, even a 1" blade will drift a bit. The resaw guide is the blue gadget in the photo below.

The guide is rounded and allows me to angle the wood moving through the blade as I cut. There's definitely an art to it and I'm going to need a lot more practice to become really proficient at it. Ah, the rigors of learning something new.

Until next time...

Day 65: Ditching the Hair-brained Scheme

Back in the Dark Ages when women sported bangs nine inches tall and mullets roamed the earth, I attended Lewis and Clark College in southwest Portland where I studied Organ Performance with Dr. Lee Garrett. Though we lost touch over the years, we've recently reengaged (no, not thanks to Facebook) and have been meeting up once a month for a couple of beers and good conversation. As you can imagine, one of the topics has been this very project. Lee and his wife, Bonnie, are both world-class keyboardists, he primarily on the pipe organ, she the harpsichord.

Dr. Garrett recently visited the Tortuga Early Instruments Worldwide Headquarters to see my progress firsthand. He follows my Facebook posts and, I suspect, this blog (hi, Lee!), so he was apprised of the recent Tortuga Early Instruments Holiday Maintenance Program, as well as my various challenges and crazy ideas about how to complete the keyboard. I showed him some of my homemade gadgets (e.g., the IKEA outfeed table) and proudly displayed the Riyobi BT3000 Cutting System (the table saw) with its built-in router mount and brand, spankin' new 1/16" roundover router bit.

He smiled and offered some encouraging words and asked a couple of pointed questions. Then, ever the teacher, he told me a story about how his mentor at University of Oregon, John Hamilton, taught him how the imperfections in playing are what really make things interesting, how changing tempo here and mixing up an embellishment there are the art part of playing instruments like the organ or harpsichord where no sustain pedal exists. He also told me a story about seeing a Vermeer painting that looked like a photograph from afar and how he could see the splotches and smears upon closer inspection.

He was telling me to ditch the hair-brained roundover bit scheme.

After thinking about it for a couple of days, I decided he was right. One of the reasons I'm working on this project is to get my hands dirty doing things the way they did them 500-600 years ago when the instrument began to take its present form. So, I clamped a key to the bench, taped it off at the second score line, grabbed raspy and fine files, and went to work.

It was incredible. I was back into the art part of creating this thing. Every stroke of the rasp felt right and the finer file made things even better. I finished up with 220- and 320-grit sandpapers and called it good until finish sanding time. The tape technique is clearly displayed in Mr. Miller's eBook Most Excellent, and I had, like so many other things, chosen to forget/ignore it in favor of expediency. Another lesson learned.

Given what I accomplished last night, I now have just 13 keys to file and sand into submission before finish sanding the entire keyboard and getting on to the next step, which, if memory serves, is building the foundation of the case.

Part of this completion process is replacing the natural tops on two keys - you can see them in the lower right corner of the photo above. This is not a big deal; it's just wood, and I'm going to use the Garrett-Wade glue because it's a "gap-filling glue." In the future, I will be using hide glue (no, not glue that hides, but glue made from animal hides) to glue the key tops because I can use heat to remove any of them should I need to. If things continue as they have, I will definitely need to.

Interestingly, Owen Daly of Daly Early Keyboard Instruments in Salem, Oregon commented on a post of mine on Facebook, recommending a different way to cover the naturals. He glues all of the key top covers on before slicing up the keys. That way, there is no fitting of the tops to be done in a post-hoc manner. This makes more sense to me and I will probably use this technique on the next one. Fortunately, Mr. Daly has agreed to allow me to visit his shop in the near future to learn more about how he builds his beautiful instruments. More to come on that as it unfolds.

Until next time...

Day 64: Stretching and Ripping

As I mentioned in the Day 63 post, I've been having a wobble challenge with the 1" resaw blade on Big Bertha. It's being caused by the new tires, so I emailed the dude I bought them from on eBay. He asked if I had used the nifty tool he sent with the tires to stretch them once they were mounted. Well, of course I didn't - why would I follow the directions he included with the tires? Knowing the answer to his question, he recommended I jam some dowel or a screwdriver between the tire and wheel and wind it around to give it a good stretch. So I did.

As you can see, it was a delicate operation. Okay, it wasn't delicate at all. Like everything else when a bandsaw tire is involved, it was dang difficult and a little scary because I didn't want to harm the integrity of the $55 tires (I think I spent less on four tires for my first car). I also realized that, given the hump in the middle of the tires, I probably should have gone with a 3/4" blade, which would take up less real estate on the tires and, hopefully, reduce the potential for wobble as it moves over them. Another lesson learned.

At any rate, I got the job completed and realized during the operation that I need to figure out a way to clean the tires as I'm making cuts; they accumulate a thin layer of sawdust between the blade and the tire. George Vondriska of Woodworking Guild of America fame offers a video on how to epoxy a toothbrush into the body of a bandsaw for just such a function. I'm not sure my electric will work for this, so it's a trip to the store to purchase a brush and some epoxy.

On an unrelated matter, the 1/16" roundover router bit arrived yesterday at the Tortuga Early Instruments Worldwide Headquarters. This is good because I'm planning on using it to round the edges of the natural key top heads as I engage my three-part approach to the naturals. I have no idea if this will work, but I'm willing to give it a shot. The African blackwood is hard to work with and chips easily as I notch the corners near the second score line (discussed in a previous post).

Because the key top heads are consistently the same size (3cm x 2.3cm) , I will be ripping pieces of thinly cut blackwood and then using the roundover bit to get a good, consistent rounded edge on all of them. This should work, as I've heard from other builders that it's being done somewhere out there (Bill Jurgenson in Germany to mention one builder doing it this way). Regardless, I was able to get the blackwood cut to size using the new Rockler Woodworking and Hardware thin rip table saw jig.

The next step is to start ripping pieces to width (2.3cm) for the keytops and additional pieces at 5mm for the scored strip that will join the keytop heads and tails. I'll be using the table saw crosscut sled with the Freud thin rip blade to accomplish all of these on the table saw. Safety first at Tortuga Early Instruments!

Until next time...

Day 63: New Naturals

I've made a management decision: I'm going to carefully slice off all of the natural key top heads and start over using my three-part strategy. I already have a jig in mind for making this a manageable task. As you saw in a previous post, I picked up a large piece of African blackwood for this purpose and was planning on ripping 1/8" strips from it. The trouble was that I had only used a featherboard and ruler to accomplish this before with sketchy results. Most of the strips I ripped for the original heads came out at 1/8" thickness; the ones that didn't are now on the inlay scrap pile.

I took a little trip during the day job lunch today to the local Rockler Woodworking and Hardware and picked up two key tools (both on sale!) that will help me rip and resaw just about anything I need. First, I grabbed a table saw thin rip jig. This jig is awesome. The tick marks on the yellow background in the photo below are at 1/16" and 1/8". You just plug it into the saw's miter slot, zero the really cool little bearing against the saw blade and move it back however many ticks make sense for the thickness of your rip.

It worked like a charm.

And the Freud glue line rip blade cuts so smoothly, the resulting cut face needs just a little finish sanding. I'm very, very pleased with these results, which makes the natural key top head rework less disastrous - at least in my mind (which is all that really matters).

While browsing the aisles at Rockler, I went ahead and picked up a pack of universal fence clamps. As their name implies, these are intended to be used primarily with a fence of some kind and I needed a way to temporarily mount the Kreg resaw guide to Big Bertha's fence without interfering with the wood as it slides merrily along. As you can see in the photo below, these clamps were just the ticket.

The Kreg resaw guide in the photo above is a 7-incher. I worked on a side project over the weekend and resawed some (expensive) quarter sawn white oak that was only about 4 inches wide. It became apparent as I cut that I would benefit from having Kreg's 4 1/2" version of the resaw guide in the shop, as well, so expect to see it appear in resaw photos one day soon.

Speaking of resawing, I'm having a bit of a challenge with the new tires on Big Bertha causing the blade to wobble. This is not good. The whole point of the Timber Wolf thin kerf resaw blade was to cut down on the amount of wood consumed by the blade during resawing. The wobble creates a wider path through the wood and also damages the accuracy with which I can make a cut. I'll be deblading the saw and stretching the tires one day soon. Easy, right? If you hear someone screaming profanities within a 10-block radius of the Tortuga Early Instruments Worldwide Headquarters, you'll know I'm stretching away on those tires.

Until next time...

Day 62: Back to Work

I had a little adventure with the table saw a couple of nights ago that put me in the frame of mind wherein I seriously considered sending it to a new home via Craigslist. Now that the tilt gear solved the blade tilt issue, I could not get the blade to move up or down. Period. I found myself muscling it much like I did when the tilt gear was broken, so my inner dialogue ran something like, "Great, one or both of the riser gears (there are two) or the screw or something has stripped out like the tilt gear."

Fortunately, I was wrong. I took the side off and shot some WD-40 onto the gears and screw. It didn't help, though they probably needed it pretty badly. I then looked at the spring that engages/disengages to alternately run the tilt or riser action; it wasn't engaging. Ah ha! I then fiddled around with the handle and discovered that when I had put the saw back together after the tilt gear adventure, I had neglected to screw the set screw all the way in. This prevented the spring from providing sufficient tension to activate/deactivate the tilt and riser actions.

An Allen wrench saved the day on this one and, with the WD-40 providing lubrication, I can now raise and lower the blade with one finger. No more Craigslist, though I very much would like to upgrade to a SawStop some time soon.

Now that the Tortuga Early Instruments Holiday Maintenance Program has concluded and all tools and machines are as good as they're gonna get, I was able to jump back onto the keyboard work. While sanding away, trying not to ruin the notch area, I decided that I'm going to go ahead and try a new method for creating the natural key tops. This will involve making a three-piece key top, rather than a two-piece as recommended by Mr. Miller in his eBook Most Excellent. You can probably spot why I've decided to do this in the photo below.

I'm just not getting the results I want from the Dremel sanding/filing/hand sanding method I'm currently using. I want consistency across all key tops and I'm not realizing that. I admit that this is probably a skill issue, or lack thereof, yet why continue to produce sub-par results when I can build the mousetrap in a better way?

My idea is to continue to use the longer tail as a single piece. The real change will involve assembling the head piece from two parts - one is 5 mm wide (the part with the two scores in the photo above) and the other is 2.3 cm x 3 cm. In completing the larger part, I will cut a long strip 2.3 cm wide and use a 1/16" roundover router bit to round both sides. I will then cut them to length and glue the two pieces on before adding the tail pieces later in the process.

This may sound a little crazy, but Andrew Nolan, an Australian builder, has told me that Bill Jurgenson, a German builder, does this very thing. Well, I don't know if he does the three-part approach, but he is using a roundover bit for consistency. I have friended him on Facebook and hope to learn more about his process in the days ahead.

I haven't yet decided if making this shift will require me to shave off all of the key top heads on the current keyboard. I'm thinking this may be the solution because I frankly cannot abide how they currently look. I'll post updates here on my decision and progress over the next few days.

Until next time...

Project Update: The Saga of Big Bertha's Resaw Blade (Cont'd)

Big Bertha's new resaw blade arrived back at Tortuga Early Instruments Worldwide Headquarters last night and I installed it almost immediately. The size turns out to be exactly 129", according to Dan the Blade Man. I missed it by that much. It was only after I installed the new blade that I noticed the teeth were upside down. By upside down, I mean they were pointed upward, rather than downward. It was momentarily confounding - until I thought about it. I took the blade off, held it at 10:00 and 2:00 and gave it a little flip. Voila! The teeth suddenly pointed in the right direction. As you can see below, she really enjoys her new accessory.

I was able to slice up a piece of alder from a firewood pile that had been drying in the shop for the better part of a year. Alder. As far as lutherie and just about anything else I work on goes, it just doesn't hold much appeal for me. The pieces are not large enough to carve out a solid electric guitar body. Maybe I can chop some up and sell them as pen blanks; they do have a little spalting from sitting in the rain for so long. Or maybe I'll just burn them in the fire pit on the back porch this summer. We'll see.

On an unrelated matter, I'd like to explain why I continue to work on tools and machines, rather than the instrument. I am not at all happy with the results I'm achieving with the keyboard. Each natural key top is inconsistently rounded and smoothed. This may very well be a skill - or lack thereof - issue, yet I firmly believe I can use a 1/16" roundover router bit to get consistent, perfectly rounded key tops. I'll be picking up a bit later this week and testing out my idea over the weekend. Barring any strangeness, and I've seen a bit of that, it should work as planned.

Until next time...

Project Update: The Saga of Big Bertha's Resaw Blade

Big Bertha's new resaw blade arrived yesterday; it's a Timber Wolf 1" x 130" 3 tpi (teeth per inch) monster that I will use to cut my own lumber and tonewoods. This is important because a small shop like mine is generally forced to pay top dollar for guitar and harpsichord sound boards and guitar sides and backs, necks, and various other parts. The minute a reseller puts a blade to a billet (a larger piece of wood), the cost skyrockets. I dig skyrockets during the Fourth of July, but not in this case. The photo below is the beauty as it came through the front door of Tortuga Early Instruments Worldwide Headquarters.

I feverishly unpacked it, removed the old blade from Big Bertha, started installing  the beast and...wah...wah...waaaaaah...it's the wrong size. I mismeasured by about 1/2". Yeah, frustrating. I was so careful to tape twine around the old blade and then measure it, but, alas, my accuracy seems to have suffered. In this case, measure twice, order once seems to be the guiding principle. Okay, I actually did measure twice and would have bet the farm it was 130". It's a good thing I don't own a farm.

When I was a kid, I worked at a market supply company and one of my favorite tasks was to make band saw blades for meat processors. Typically, the blade material comes on a large spool and the guy making the blade measures it, cuts it to length, and uses a nifty little welding tool to splice the ends together. The last step is to grind off any bulging material left by the weld.

I was awakened at 3:00 a.m. this morning with the realization that all I needed to do was contact a local company that makes blades in such a fashion. I could have them cut out the necessary length and reweld it, rather than purchase another blade and wait patiently for it to arrive, not to mention spend another $40 unnecessarily. While awaiting the blade to arrive, I visited Woodcrafters here in Portland and noticed they sell Timber Wolf blades. I could have ordered the monster from them, probably without the additional shipping cost. Lesson learned.

Given my early morning epiphany, I was able to locate a guy just north of Tortuga Early Instruments Worldwide Headquarters who specializes in selling custom band saw blades. He is cutting and rewelding the blade for me for $6.00 and I will have it back in the shop and installed on Big Bertha on Monday. I consider this a Bonehead Fee and am more than happy to pay it. I will also be purchasing any and all blades I need in the future from him. It's nice to find a savior.

Until next time...

Project Update: Crosscut Sled and Cleaning Completed

As I was completing the table saw crosscut sled, taking photos, and sharing them on Facebook, I noticed the shop was a mess. By a mess, I mean it looked like this:

I only snapped this one perspective because it was, frankly, embarrassing how much chaos I had introduced into the place over time. Granted, I have an amazing ability to pile (you should see my writing desk) and an even more amazing ability to completely ignore a mess. As I concluded the Tortuga Early Instruments* Holiday Maintenance Program and was ready to wrap up the sled, I realized I was moving things from one pile to the next, from one side of the shop to the other.

So, I embarked on a two-day mini cleaning project that resulted in this:

 

Now, I can move around the place without tripping over anything (safety) and I can find whatever I'm looking for (sanity). I also found a bunch of stuff I've been moving from house to house for the last 10 years. I've always said, "If I haven't looked at it in a year, it goes." Well, this stuff needed to go, so I put it up on Craigslist and a couple of things have sold so far; if it's not all gone by Sunday, the remaining items will find a new home at Goodwill. I've managed to bring in $60 for the Tortuga Early Instruments Shop Reinvestment Program and am hoping for another $40 through the weekend.

Once I finished cleaning and organizing, I returned my attention to the table saw crosscut sled. The point of such a contraption is to cut down, eliminate, really, the possibility of kickbacks and to also cut more accurately. The design is simple: it's just an open-ended, open-top box with a piece of aluminum mounted on the bottom to line it up with the blade for a perfect cut every time. As you can see in the first photo below, I added two sticky back tape measures to the inside for greater accuracy.

 

Now that the sled is completed and the shop is clean and tidy, I can finally return to the point of this entire exercise: completing the harpsichord.  Thanks for hanging in there with me as I acquired the latest tools and machines and got things in shape for the coming year. I have a feeling it's going to be a good one.

Until next time...

*As you may have noticed, I've changed the shop name from Tortuga Ancient Instruments to Tortuga Early Instruments to more accurately reflect the instruments I build - harpsichords and Baroque guitars.

Project Update: Smooth Operator Gets a New Belt

I bought a lot of link belt material; more than I needed, really. In my defense, I thought I was going to be able to replace Little Buddy's belt, but it's a funky proprietary thing that will not accept a link belt. I guess I should have checked first. Instead, I installed a link belt on the jointer and finally gave it a name based on its new status: Smooth Operator. I know, it's cheesy, but I'm sticking with it unless and until my wife tells me to pick another.

As you know, I love nothing more than naming a machine, so it was a good day, indeed.

Speaking of good days, I was able to get a nice, tall resaw fence installed on Big Bertha. Now, Mark Roberts of Mark Roberts Guitars and Ukuleles tells me I will need another fence with a balance point on it, but I disagree. Once the 1" blade arrives, I believe it will be stiff enough to work through anything I have in mind. At this point, I'm just considering slicing up a few logs to make some boards. I think Mark is referring to cutting much thinner stock for instrument soundboards, backs and sides. Perhaps this will cause the blade to drift, but I really don't think so.

The first step was to locate some scrap from which I could cut the fence.

The fence that came on the saw has three holes in it, probably to allow the mounting of an additional board for resawing and other purposes. In this case, I went ahead and countersunk three holes in the scrap board after cutting it to size on the table saw and used wingnuts and lock washers to mount it to the fence.

I'm going to wait until the new blade arrives to resaw anything because the one currently on the machine is in very, very poor shape. If I need that single point Mark mentioned (this allows one to compensate for blade drift during a cut by tilting the feed material), I'll simply mount a piece of dowel to the board and, voila!, I've saved $125 by not purchasing a Kreg resaw fence.

When I told my wife I was using the same accounting principles as the federal government and that this allowed me to start a Tortuga Early Instruments Shop Reinvestment Program in which I could promptly reinvest the money saved back into the shop, she just looked at me.

I think she's on to me.

Until next time...

Project Update: The Terminator has Arrived

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