Project Update: Open House Fun

As you probably know, we held an open house at Tortuga Early Instruments Worldwide Headquarters this past weekend. About a dozen people filtered in and out throughout the day. It was a wonderful time to see old and new friends and a couple of people I would not have put money on showed up. Mostly, we talked and reminisced and ate cookies and drank cider (and other stuff). Oh, and talked about harpsichords a bit.

The intent was to "close the combs" on the upper registers as a demonstration of what goes on at the Headquarters. Given the entertainment factor, I was not able to do that. So, it was more a rolling party, rather than a real open house where the visitors could watch me work on the instrument. One of them did manage to make some nice curls on some oak with the LN low-angle jack plane, so there was that. In the end, it was, in a word, awesome.

I really was prepared to close the combs...

Have I progressed far enough on the instrument for an open house? Probably not. Yet, this was more about offering my friends an opportunity to see the shop and the instrument in progress and ask any questions they might have had. There were lots of good ones and it gave me an opportunity to realize that perhaps I do know a little more about the harpsichord than the average Joe. True, very little, but more nonetheless.

On a couple of unrelated notes, Random Roger Green stopped by a couple of weeks ago bearing gifts: some tasty ebony tidbits.

Normaly, I'm wary of Greeks bearing gifts, but I don't think Roger is Greek, so I probably needn't worry about it. I am grateful, though. He has requested some of my BBQ as payment, which I am happy to supply at a later date ("I will gladly repay you Tuesday for some ebony today.").

Something I've not talked about much is the inadequacy of the throat plates supplied with the Grizzly table saw; they're about 1/2 rung above crap, so I made a zero-clearance out of - you guessed it - walnut that works great, but the screws were giving me trouble, so I decided to replace them. In my wisdom, I didn't think it through to realize that just about everything from Grizzly is made in China or Taiwan, so I purchased standard screws and managed to snap one off in one of the holes. If I had purchased metric, it would have been fine.

So, I picked up this hand-dandy measuring thing at Lowe's (no more shopping at the Orange Box) to get more accurate screw size measurements moving forward. Not a big deal, I know, but if you feel that strongly about it, you're welcomed to come get the remaining piece of screw out of the hole for me.

Finally, another book found its way to Tortuga Early Instruments Worldwide Headquarters.

It's a good one and I'm hoping it's not outdated, as most of them are these days. I'm sure one of the Master Builders will let me know if it is. Regardless, I'm going to pore over it this coming week to learn what I can.

Until next time...