Interestingly, more than two centuries after Arnault of Zwolle, he too mentions the use of a hot gluing iron and glued paper strips, suggesting a very good deal of continuity in methods of lute making. Finally Diderot"s Encyclopedie has good illustrations of lutherie, but this is rather a late source for our purposes. The written sources then are helpful, but are few and scattered, and in any case I think one can be sure that, as today, different lutemakers and different workshops must have used different methods to achieve the same end, making it harder still to talk with confidence about "authenticity", let alone one definitively authentic type of lutemaker"s workshop.
Moreover, each craftsman would have made many of his own woodworking tools, giving rise to further diversity. Besides these sources specifically pertaining to lutherie, there are many more general sources. Fortunately for our purposes both Joseph, father of Jesus, and Noah when he had to build the ark practiced carpentry.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to assume that lutemakers would have used the general woodworking tools of their day—as of course lutemakers do today —so we can look to paintings of general carpentry for information. I think also that paintings of carpenters and carpentry tools must be accurate, because painters must have worked closely with woodworkers, for painters did not only paint fine art paintings on canvas or panels in the renaissance.
For instance, the artists Francesco and Giacopo Bassano, painted not only paintings, but bedsteads, murals, the town clock, and so on so I have read working alongside the woodworkers who made these items, and many painters painted panels on carved wooden altarpieces, so I think we can assume real familiarity with woodworking tools.
Incidentally there is painting of Noah building the ark, by Leonardo Bassano, but too dark to reproduce here. Wierix lived from to , mostly in Antwerp. On the title page, notice the bench, without a vice but with a bench stop, some sort of marking gauge lying on the bench, frame saw, planes, chisels, ruler, and behind the two-handed saw on the right a long saw looking rather like a sword. In this picture Jesus, guarded by guardian angels, is blowing bubbles, a childlike activity, but also evoking symbolism of the transience of human life, while Mary works on a piece of cloth.
Note the rack of chisels on the wall, and the frame, compasses, and a plane on the shelf. This source includes a small curved item on the bench, a "holdfast" Top right of the above image which, fitting into a hole in the bench, was used to hold a piece of wood in place, the British-style coffin-shaped smoothing plane, and the Continental-style planes with shepherd"s-crook handles this print seems to have copied from a French source.
The screw clamp on the side of the bench, and the handsaw, something like a modern one, were just beginning to come in at this period—the late 17th century.
Jost Amman"s Book of Trades shows a joiner"s workshop as well as a lutemaker"s, with a frame saw, some sort of marking gauge, wooden squares, and planes—the planing being done against a bench stop. He also shows carpenters at work outdoors hewing beams and making a timber frame for a building.
Amman also has a picture of coopers, and I think this is of interest because a barrel is a little like the back of a lute, made of ribs, curved and beveled. Amman"s picture of a bookbinder shows the use of a draw knife; also the bookbinders frame, just the same as hand-bookbinders use today, and a tool called the bookbinder"s plough used to trim off the edge of the paper.
Throughout, the degree of continuity between crafts, and over time, is striking. His picture of a crossbowmaker not such a common trade today!
A great many of the tools are immediately recognisable today, but there are interesting differences. For instance the saws are mostly frame saws, or saws slightly curved and shaped like a sword. They did not have the technology years ago to roll wide flat strips of steel needed for the blade of a modern handsaw, so in the frame saw, they used a narrow blade, held in tension, to keep it stiff.
These saws were still popular until quite recently on the Continent, though the wide-bladed handsaw popular in Britain and America has really now taken over. Another big difference is in the techniques for holding wood.
Until the 18th century woodworkers did not generally use vices for holding wood, instead using bench stops when a piece of wood is being planed the forward movement of the plane simply holds the wood in place against the bench stop or a bench dog, or the holdfast, noted above.
Craftsmen often give their tools animal names: shaving horse, saw horse, bench dogs—holding tools especially, which is why I regard myself as in search of the lutemaker"s donkey.
However, I have come across an illustration from showing a very modern looking workbench, with a tail vice and a side vice. Why was the vice not more widely used by woodworkers, for even primitive vices are not thought to have been widely used by carpenters until the mid or late 17th century?
I think there are several reasons. Other ways of wood may have been regarded as perfectly adequate; also the productivity of the workshop was important and it is much quicker to simply put a piece of wood against a bench stop if you wish to plane it, than to spend time winding and unwinding a vice.
Significantly, Jost Amman does show a vice in his Book of Trades, but in a cutler"s Messerschmidt workshop. Metalworkers had the skills and materials to make a metal vice, and more to the point, needed vices, because there are some metalworking operations which cannot really be performed without one.
They would have been prepared to go the trouble and expense of making or buying in a vice and spending time winding and unwinding it. Perhaps the vice was regarded as a smith"s tool; it would be interesting to know if there were any guild regulations concerning the ownership and use of vices. The late mediaeval poem "The debate of the Carpenter's tools" provides us with a comprehensive list of tools available to the late fifteenth century woodworker when the tools debate among themselves why their master brings home so little money for his wife, concluding that he spends too much in the alehouse.
More prosaic, and more immediately useful for this project is an inventory of tools left by an Essex joiner, Cornelius Eversen, at his death in , reprinted in Newsletter of the Tool and Trades History Society 47, pp. This includes:. Imprimis, Joiners plane of divers woods 15 Item jointers 2 Foreplanes 2 Smoothing planes 1 Squares 4 Mitre squares 1 Adze 1 Hatchet 1 Handsaws 1 Frame Saws 1 Hammers 1 Holdfasts 2 Gauges 2 One brace and five bits for the same Three files Two broad pairing chisels Three mortise chisels Three small Flemish chisels One gouge Three ripping chisels One line rowle with the line upon it Two staples or bank hooks Two rules of two foot apiece Three mallets Two spare planing irons.
If a joiner had these tools, then a lutemaker could certainly have had them. A Spnaish inventory of a violero"s workshop tools is reproduced in Lute News 71, p. There is also the inventory of tools of a lutemaker in Leiden, published in Vlam, Chr. A few tools survive from my chosen period and indeed from much earlier; some Roman planes survive, as do Viking ones, and they seem remarkably familiar to the modern carpenter in their design.
Some of the Viking tools have been shown to be steel-tipped, for instance iron plane blades with steel edges forged on; plane blades were still being made like this in the 19th century, which helps to justify my use of Victorian blades for my reconstructed tools.
Nautical disasters have preserved useful examples of preserved early tools, for instance planes and a carpenter"s rule survive from the Mary Rose, sunk in and partly recovered from the bed of the Solent in It is interesting to note that that the Mary Rose rule has an eighth of an inch as its smallest division.
This gives an insight into the attitude to measurement in an age when every artefact was custom made: parts would be made to fit each other, not made to precise, predetermined sizes as is essential for modern batch or mass production.
A slightly less well-known disaster than the loss of the Mary Rose is the failure of William Barents" expedition to find the North East Passage to the Indies, by trying to sail round the north coast of Russia. The expedition got caught in the ice in , and the explorers were forced to build a shelter and spend a winter in Novaya Zemlya.
In the spring, they left their camp, only to find their ship had been crushed by the pack ice, and so they had to build a new boat for their return journey. They could not carry very much in this boat, and so had to abandon many of their tools. Their cabin, still standing, and containing tools, clothing and other items, was rediscovered in the 19th century, and these historic artefacts are now in the Netherlands, in the Rijksmuseum.
Tools recovered from Barents" camp in Novaya Zemlya, now in the Rijksmuseum, include a brace and bit, plane, plane blade or iron. The date of is of course just the right date for my planned workshop though I changed my plans later, as explained below , and I have based one of my planes on the Novaya Zemlya discovery. Some chisels found at Novaya Zemlya seem rather modern in design.
I have also seen photographs, in Gerrit van der Sterre's Four Centuries of Dutch Planes and Planemakers , of a Dutch carpenter"s toolbox from a shipwreck, I think now conserved in Holland. The European tradition of making lutes as such is a broken one, but some near Eastern traditions of making lute-family instruments are not.
Pickens, Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey has useful photographs of a Turkish saz maker at work, bending ribs with a bending iron shaped like a trowel, which he presses down on a rib lying on his bench, chiselling bent ribs to size, then planing them like a cooper that is, on an "upside down" plane which held on the bench, with the blade projecting slightly from it; the maker holds the wood to be planed and moves it over the plane, rather than moving the plane over the wood , and fitting ribs over a ribbed body mould.
Also, much can be learned from own rural woodcraft traditions. For example, the well known maker of windsor chairs Jack Goodchild had his workshop at Naphill, near High Wycombe, Bedfordshire, and photographs of his workshop in the s have been published in books on handcrafts. I believe it is documented that the great lute making workshops of the 16th century bought in large stocks of parts, such as ribs and wood for soundboards, that had already been roughly cut out near where the trees were felled.
This was a matter of economics; transport was expensive and it made no sense to transport a lot of wood that would end up as waste over long distances. Cutting out and roughly shaping these parts was probably a job for rural people who had little employment in the winter.
A lot of work was done in the woods, an energy efficient practicethat continued until recent times and is now being revived as fuel and transport costs rise. Pictures from the unbroken traditions section can be found in Lute News, backissue 70, July. In all this, I am fascinated by the idea of using seemingly simple tools to gain very precise results, producing objects of the greatest beauty and refinement.
Woodworkers today tend to have a large number of very specialised tools in their workshops; I suspect that lute makers in those days would have had fewer tools than modern makers; and that skilled workers could use, say, an axe to get very precise results.
See for instance this sculptor using a large axe for what one would imagine to be fine work. I think this humorous woodcut shows a mother presenting her wayward, drunken son to the sculptor, asking him to make him into a complete man, just as he is completing the wooden statue.
Note the collection of tools at the sculptors feet, depicted with some care; the woodcut maker was himself a woodworker, of course. From modern times, I have seen a photograph of around showing an English craftsman making a malt shovel out of a large piece of beech, using a special axe to hollow the thin delicate shovel blade. While some of these tools—chisels, hammers, mallets—were surely used then exactly as they are now, others were not, and require practical experiments to help to recreate lost methods.
For instance, how were glue pots heated? It seems likely that wood shavings were often used, as these seem to have been a common cause of accidental fires. How were very small holes made? A bow drill might be a likely possibility and is relatively easy to make, in its simplest form.
A gimlet could be used for larger holes? How was the neck of the lute fastened to the neck block? Modern lute makers invariably use screws but I am fascinated by the single big nail which we know all the historical makers used, clearly seen on X-rays of old lutes. You can buy hand-forged nails, with square shanks and large heads, these look the part but are made from mild steel not wrought iron, so it will be a matter of commissioning a smith to make some from this more historically appropriate material.
A hole has to be drilled in the neck first, and I have read that there was a practice of heating the nail before driving it in. Of course there is the question of how to hold the neck in place during these operations. The sheer number of lutes and unassembled or partly assembled instruments attested in the inventories of the great 16th century lute makers workshops or factories, perhaps we should call them suggests that luthiers may have employed substantial workforces, and division of labour, so "authentic" lutemaking practices might reflect this.
I have built copies of tools from the various historical sources discussed above. Inevitably there are compromises; I am using modern metal for the metal parts including 19th century blades in some cases , whereas metal may have been of variable quality in renaissance times.
Copy of Dutch "Schaaf-Type" plane of , illustrated in W. It was hard to make, and tends to "chatter" in use, leaving ridges on the surface of the wood. I have not used this plane because of its poor performance, preferring the barents plane which worked well straight away, which indicates that the best preserved historical tools and lutes may have been used little and survived in unworn condition because they were no good?
These are a little too early for the purposes of my project, so I used the Wierix engravings to arrive at other details such as the handles, and the body shape was based on pictures of Dutch planes of the 17th century.
Both planes were made deeper than the Mary Rose designs as I presume that these planes were not new when the ship went down and planes lost depth over time as their soles are "trued up" by themselves being planed. These planes both have single irons, as the "double iron" did not appear until the early 18th century. The irons used are old, probably 19th century examples, which I believe will function in an identical manner to those of the s. Frame saws I have based mine on the several examples in the Wierix engravings.
I believe my use of modern blades is acceptable, because even though a blade of — would have been hand made, the smiths of those times would have been capable of producing a very accurate and serviceable item.
That this is so is shown by the many examples of metalworking of an unbelievably high standard preserved in museums. For the curved parts of frames I have selected wood which has a natural curve in the grain, as this is stronger than cutting curves out of straight-grained material.
Squares, straightedges and rules Squares and straightedges are seen in more than one of Wierix engravings, and I have based my square on these, and on illustration in Goodman and S. The brace works reasonably well and I have made it so that I can change the bit sizes by using interchangeable wooden pads.
Mallet I have made a mallet like the ones illustrated in several of the scenes in the Wierix engravings. I made it as I like the pleasing cylindrical head, curved along its length, and its archaic appearance.
I experimented with forging different shapes of bending iron, and metal holdfasts, amongst other things. Some of the old tool designs seem to have hidden advantages; such discoveries are one of the things that makes experimental archaeology so worthwhile. For instance, while a wooden square may go out of true if you dropped it on the floor, it is light in weight, and would be unlikely to accidentally mark the wood you are working on. I read that these were made from old casks, so I visited Young"s Brewery!
I think the reason they used this wood was that it was of good quality, and cut in a certain direction quarter sawn, or rather split for greater dimensional stability. Planes without handles, clearly shown in pictures, while a little harder to hold than those with handles, are easier to lay upside down on the bench when planing lute ribs moving the wood over the plane rather than the plane over the wood.
Old chisels tend to be thinner than modern ones, perhaps because steel was so expensive, but this makes them easier to sharpen, as there is less metal to take away.
One more thing I have found is that making you own tools teaches self-reliance. Perhaps all wood and metalworking students should be required to make some of their own tools! Before launching in on my blow-by-blow description of my lute building project, perhaps I should reiterate a philosophical point, common to all experimental archaeology. We have a mixture of certainties, probabilities and possibilities.
Where we are not absolutely sure what the lutemakers of old did, all we can establish with certainty is that such and such a method, using the technologies and materials that we know they possessed, could have been used, or may have been used, to produce the historical instruments that we see. The earliest surviving lutes date from the early 16th century; a little older is the clavicytherium in the Royal College of Music. Of south German origin, from c.
There are often clues to making practices in the form of scribed setting out lines and tool marks in interiors or parts of instruments usually hidden from view. Another very useful source on historical instruments are paintings and representations in sculpture and intarsia, especially because they can show us the designs of instruments at a specific date and location.
One painting further to those mentioned above is of the building of Noah"s Ark, of , in the Bedford Book of Hours, which shows the use of wedges as a holding device, rather as modern joiners use wedges and a notched piece of wood in the process of planing a door. From my own workbench, this picture shows how simple dowel pegs fitting into holes in the bench, and a wedge, can be used to hold wood in place for planing.
Other interesting pictures are in Agricola"s De Re Metallica showing the use of dividers in dividing angles and workmen following templates; and this drawing of a workbench, from Nuremberg in including a representation of an early vice, not generally in use for woodwork until much later.
Initially I aimed to make an Elizabethan lute from the age of Dowland, but later moved the project backwards to the 15th century. This is because of the existence of a uniquely detailed, illustrated manuscript from this time, describing the design and making of a lute, the manuscript of Henri Anaut of Zwolle of c. I decided to follow Ian Harwood"s translation Lute Society Journal, as best I can, trying hard to resist the temptation to introduce too many "improvements" of my own.
I am aware that David van Edwards has suggested that Arnaut misunderstood some of the practices of his own time see Lute News 70 but decided on balance to follow Arnaut as closely as I could.
I have mentioned that woodworkers seem not to have used screw vices so I have based my bench top on this illustration from the Nuremburg Hausbuch, showing a joiner working at bench with a three-peg system and other pegs to use as stops to hold wood for planing.
This bench with three pegs and wedges as used by chair makers and modern green-wood workers or bodgers is very easy to use especially for uneven, tapered instrument parts.
The photographs above show how this system can be used to hold a piece of wood vertically; here the pegs are used as shooting board end stops—exactly as in the picture of the 15th century joiner above, with the layout of the pegs in the same pattern.
The following photographs show the successive stages in my attempt to reconstruct the methods of a late-medieval instrument maker as described by Arnault over years ago. Note the simplicity of the technology, and the absence of working drawings. I followed all of Arnault"s instructions the best I could and added things of my own where necessary if not mentioned in Arnault's manuscript and using materials and technology readily available and appropriate to the time period.
Here the lute mould base is being set out following Anault"s instructions, showing all the tools needed: compasses, scriber and straightedge for a design based on a fixed set of proportions, the measurements derived from a chosen string length.
Note the stick at the rear, not mentioned by Arnaut, but on this can be "stored" all of the main measurements or proportions I derived for setting out a lute of my chosen string length.
Something like this would be easy for a jouneyman luthier to carry away when his apprenticeship had ended, perhaps. It is interesting to note that Arnaut"s design for a clavichord, likewise, derives all its dimensions from a single initial measurement, and proportions based on it. Again this demonstrates the multi-usefulness of the pegs to hold work against. I used a bow saw for this, a knife and a chisel. Planing the "bulkhead" wood to the correct thickness to fit in the channels in the base to gauged lines.
Marking the semicircles on the "bulkheads", simply sticking the wood for the bulkhead in the channel in the bass, and using the dividers to mark the bulkhead, with the mould base dictating the diameters of the bulkhead circles. Fitting the "bulkheads" to the base board and chiselling their tapered profile. I marked the angles on them but cut the facets on later after they were glued in place. Gluing the bulkheads in their channels—please forgive the use of a modern aluminum pan!
Note the small "square" used to ensure they are perpendicular to the mould base. Preliminary shaping of lime end blocks with a side axe; Arnaut"s design has a block at each end. This axe is resembled the one shown in the Jost Amman "Lautenmacher" woodcut.
Planing the end blocks against bench pegs so that they will have a good 90 degree angle with the mould base board. The block can be held in place between pegs and wedge in spite of its irregular shape with the aid of scrap wood. Using an awl to make a nail hole in the completed mould base. This is to hold the end blocks onto the mould base temporarily, while the body is being assembled.
Ready to temporarily nail the rough-shaped end block to the mould; note the angle of the nail to pull the block against the bulkhead. Chiselling the blocks to profile and with facets so that the ends of the ribs contact properly when glued. I made simple wedge clamps using appropriate technology and materials to clamp the thin rib wood to the bench top so it can be planed to thickness.
Arnaut does not give any clues as to how this would have been done, but the Bedford Book of Hours shows wedges in use, so inspired by this I made a simple clamp to hold the ribs in place for planing, and these worked very well. Here is another slightly more complicated possibility: a planing board for holding thin wood while planing it. There is little point in thicknessing strips of wood much wider than you will require for the ribs, so here I am gauging rib wood to width before thicknessing, using a marking gauge.
The surplus width can be broken off along the line scribed by the point of the guage. The ribs are then planed to the correct thickness, being held in place with a simple clamp, as shown above. How does one gauge the thickness of the ribs to make them consistent?
I used a piece of scrap wood of the correct thickness I cheated a bit here: I had measured the wood, it was 1. This method seems to me to work well and is quick as the wood doesn"t need to be removed from the clamp on the bench as is necessary with modern dial calipers. At this point in my talk, I was gratified to be informed by Stephen Gottleib that he had been using this same method for the last thirty or so years and it had served him well—thus demonstrating that if a method is simple and it works then other people will have thought of it, and it is very likely to have been used in the past.
A toothed iron in the plane is needed to avoid tearing up the grain of the more figured wood. There is a Roman toothed plane in existence, so this is an ancient technology. The 'furrowed' surface left by the toothed blade is then scraped smooth. One of the 16th century inventories mentions sword tips in use as scrapers. Here I am heating the bending iron to bend the ribs, obviously compromising on the use of 16th century technology!
Arnaut of Zwolle mentions the use of an iron; this iron is based upon the Turkish insrument maker"s bending iron illustrated in Laurence Picken"s Folk Musical instruments of Turkey; reproduced in Lute News 70, p. A rib template could have been used here, along with a scriber to mark the outline on the rib.
I wonder if charcoal, chalk or a lead stylus could have been used for marking on wood before the days of the carpenter"s pencil. Using this method, consistency somewhat depends on the accuracy and consistency of the mould. Then more precisely, with a plane. The rib is compared often with the mould. Many of these pictures show me working one-handed simply because I have the camera in the other hand. The centre rib is ready for gluing, with the small nails, hammer etc.
I decided to use nails because I have read that some old lutes have small holes under the end clasp. The end of the rib is pre-bored with an awl to avoid splitting.
A couple of nails were put in two of the bulkheads along the centre rib"s edge to help make sure it wouldn"t slip out of its proper position. Removing small nails when glue has set. For all of the other ribs only one nail in each end block was needed. Using a small knife to make sure the ribs are not glued to the mould; this is done after gluing each rib and allows easy removal of the completed body from the mould.
For Anault"s "rather warm iron" used to glue each rib to its neighbour I based my design of gluing iron on Thomas Mace"s description in his Musick"s Monument. Here I am using the iron and glued paper strips in the way a modern maker uses masking or sellotape, to hold the glued ribs together. The hot iron sets the glue so the paper strips can be used to "clamp" the springy ribs together while the glue sets.
For some reason at first I used short glued strips of paper crossways as described by Thomas Mace. This worked, but probably created more unnecessary mess and glue to be cleaned up and was quite "fiddly" to do, picking up and gluing the small pieces. Next I used Arnault"s long strips of paper and found that these worked better, tending to help keep the rib edges in line along the whole length and allowing me to work my way along the rib pushing and pulling the joints together even where the fitting was not as precise as it should have been!
I found that it was easier to brush plenty of glue I think I was probably over-generous on the rib for a few inches, the glue going naturally between the ribs, and applying the paper strip to the glue on the rib rather than onto the paper creating a sticky and weaker, because a bit soggy ungainly paper strip, doing three or four inches at a time and holding the joints together while using the iron to set the joint in place. I warmed the ribs and end blocks to help avoid chilling the glue and in one instance scorched the edge of the last rib fixed—so take care!
I was also a bit over-zealous with the rather-too-warm iron and scorched my ribs in many places as I "set" the glued paper strips. I expect more practice will help me here, but on the whole I was very pleased with how well it worked, and I didn"t scorch my fingers, luckily. Here I am applying glue to long paper strips, then using the gluing iron. To complete fixing the rib the two rib ends were secured with the small nails in the end blocks, though the glueing iron does such a good job that this is barely necessary, as it fixes the end of the rib to the end block; but it carries the risk of scorching the wood.
At last taking the body off the mould. You can see once again the nail which has held the end block in place. The body seems satisfactory apart from a couple of gaps between the end blocks and the last ribs, possibly due to imperfect end-block shaping or excessive forcing of the ribs into place.
The next stage is to put the paper strips over the rib joints on the inside. I carefully used a damp cloth to soften the paper and glue before scraping. I discovered here that I had been a bit over-generous with the glue and over-zealous with the hot iron, causing scorch marks; I am worried about scraping the body too much if I am to remove them. Here is am using a knife to roughly trim the end clasp to a line previously scribed upon it by "pegging" it on the end of the lute body with pegs that you can see in one of the pictures below and drawing around it.
As the strip is quite wide it is hard to get it pressed flush against the body; there is a certain amount of judgement required in marking the line with the scriber. I should perhaps have smoothed end of the body down first. Here I am using compasses to find and mark the midpoint of the end clasp so it can be aligned with a centre mark on the body during gluing; I want to make it symmetrical! Using wooden peg type clamps these are like modern violin bass bar clamps , of which I made quite a few, following the suggestion of a lute maker after one of my talks at a Lute society meeting, when glueing the end clasp.
Wedges are used to apply pressure, and they work surprisingly well. The pegs and wedges are easily made from scrap wood. A range of sizes allows most clamping jobs to be done. The end clasp after gluing was rather "lumpy" and uneven I had applied too much pressure in an effort to force it onto the body, as I had mistakenly not smoothed this area out first; the thin wood is quite flexible especially when coated with warm glue so I decided to smooth out the lumps in the glued end clasp by using my bending iron as a smoothing iron to soften the glue and iron out the wrinkles.
This worked quite well. Now it was time to make the neck. I split a piece of sycamore with an axe and a club. I used the same sycamore as for other parts of the instrument; I could have used beech. Then I rough planed the neck after splitting and trimming with an axe.
I am not using a vice, but simply planing up against a bench stop. I have squared off the end of the neck; now I am using a marking gauge to mark the depth of the neck on the body end. I derived the neck proportions as much as possible from Arnaut"s drawing and then from measurements of the George Gerle lute c. I have used this book frequently in this way to fill in the gaps in Arnault"s description and as my main source, suitably modified or perhaps I should I say "retrofied" to suit my time period, on details of lute construction.
Here I am using compasses to mark the ends on the tapered neck, perpendicular to a previously marked centre line. A square could not be used as I had already planed a rough taper on the neck. An adjustable bevel could be used but I had not yet made a suitably "retrostyled" example. Here I am using a chisel to trim the neck joint surface after sawing I had not yet made the "notch and wedge" vice on my bench—it appears later, in my pegbox-making pictures—so I had to hold the neck in my hand whilst working on it, meaning I was unable to use a plane on this joint surface.
Here is the body after chiselling the neck joint. A tiny hole on the right is not a woodworm hole, but the result of a small slightly misplaced nail, used to hold the ribs in place while the glue was drying. Now it was time to try the fit of the neck joint. Here is a side view of the neck being offered up to the body. Because of the proportions I decided upon for my neck—relatively deep and narrow—my joint surface has ended up sloping slightly "backwards" the opposite way to that usually seen.
Here I have refined the joint to an almost finished fit. I have chiselled the end roughly to its finished cross section as the corners of the squared up neck made the fit of the joint edges difficult to see. Next I began work on the pegbox. Here I marking out the peg box on piece of sycamore previously split from a small log and then planed ready for use. But how to hold firmly pieces of wood with a taper? Here is the aforementioned bench notch with its accompanying wedge made in some willow I had spare and the peg box "blank".
I have made an attachment for my bench screwed in place and held in the relatively modern vice as an experimental bench top. This bench notch is shown in a number of historical illustrations, and a Roman bench top exists See William Goodman"s History of Woodworking Tools with this feature. If I had made this before I made the neck I could have used it to hold the neck, and planed it, instead of smoothing and squaring it off with a chisel, as shown above.
In fact the wood tended to move easily when wedged into the notch so I chiselled a slight undercut on the end faces and this solved the problem another example of the value of practical historical reconstruction! I was proposing to saw the back off the peg box using my large-frame ripsaw. Here I am rip-sawing the back off the peg box. Note the use of wedges to tension the rip saw; the idea for the corner wedges was taken from an old veneer saw in Mercer"s Ancient Carpenters" Tools.
Normally these ripping saws are bigger, two-man saws. With an operator guiding the saw each side any deviation from the marked line can is noticed and immediately corrected.
As I was working on my own to keep to the line I would do 20 strokes from one side, and then move the saw around to the opposite sideand do 20 from the other and so on. I had decided on a construction method that would combine the minimum of gluing and clamping with ease of construction; I would saw the back off and saw off one side only, to allow sawing and chiseling out of the slot; then I could plane the back and side and glue them back on.
Here I am planing the back of the peg box after sawing it from the peg box blank. Transferring peg box slot measurements from a drawing I have made, pricking through the paper with a scriber, onto the remaining part of the peg box. The next picture shows gluing on the side of the peg box, making use of a rather handsome stone as a clamping weight; a hearth stone, I believe, that I salvaged from a heap of rubble produced when Gateshead Council were digging in Pipewellgate to make a platform for a sculpture.
Next, I am gluing the back on the peg box after it had been planed flat. Pegs and wedges were found to be more effective than the stone this time! As ever, I use no screw clamps, but use devices which would have been very easy for the lutemaker himself to make. After I planed the sides, and here I am finishing the peg box with a chisel. It has been left over-length to be cut later when joining to the neck.
Now I decided it was time to tidy up the end clasp. Here I am using compasses to make marks so the end clasp can be cut to an even length to both sides of a centre mark on the end block before cutting the familiar decorative ends to the end clasp.
Lundberg mentions that historical instruments often have marks on their ribs indicating that this feature was cut after the end clasp was fitted. I chiselled neat angled ends to the end clasps, and then made a small template from a piece of scrap rib; this was scribed around a few times to create a deeply cut line to guide the chisel. Now it was time to start work on the soundboard. Most frustratingly, I do not currently have access to my best stocks of soundboard wood, and the only pieces of spruce I had were narrow and of poor and uneven quality so I had to join several pieces.
Here I am rubbing jointing wood for the soundboard. I like a challenge! Scribing around the body on the soundboard after planing and scraping the outside face, leaving a small allowance of half an inch all round. Using a knife to cut the outline on both sides then carefully breaking off the waste wood; this is done by simply deepening the line cut by the scriber. There is no point in spending time and energy in thicknessing the waste wood. Also my thicknessing method will be more accurate if I am planing and comparing as near as possible to the finished outline.
As when thicknessing the ribs, I used a piece of wood of the correct thickness and compare often with the soundboard while planing, simply by feeling with the fingers. One can plane the whole soundboard to fairly near the desired thickness, though you have to be careful as you get towards the middle, as this method offers no way of feeling the thickness of the wood close towards its centre.
Frequent testing for flatness of the surface with a straight edge can help here. However, as the final thickness is nearly achieved, if a relatively long plane is used and its blade is set to take very fine shavings it will in theory only allow the middle to be made one shavings thickness thinner than the edges.
I had wondered how I could gauge and control the thickness of the rose area when thinning it down, to around a millimetre. I thought I could put some veneer, paper or card of the correct thickness below this area enough to raise this area by the thickness that I needed to remove. I hoped that this selective thinning could then be achieved by planing this raised area flat. I then thought that I could use a piece of cloth as this would not mark the already smoothed and soft outer face of the belly as veneer or cardboard might do.
Here I am measuring the thickness of two layers of cloth taken from and old worn tee shirt about 0. I used the bits of wood on either side so as to avoid compressing the cloth with the calipers. I know the calipers are not appropriate but I wanted to save time and avoid experimenting with cloth and its effects.
I now know that two layers of worn tee shirt seems to do the trick. Such a trick could have been found out empirically.
The two pieces of worn cotton cloth, torn to size, are carefully placed, avoiding wrinkles, under the soundboard in the rose area. Now I planed the raised area flat. When planing a definite area the shape of the cloth emerged. I had expected the edges to be blurred as the wood bent up to accommodate the thickness but the edges and the effect of the cloth were quite "sharp".
I used a candle inside a jam jar to help avoid setting the workshop on fire! When placing the channels in the frame it might feel like a tight fit. To drill the holes, I again place the frame with the channels on top of the piece of scrap wood and did my best to drill and keep the channel in place and from moving around.
These holes will also be M8, once you've drilled all the holes repeat the process of inserting the M5 bolts from the bottom, and lock washer, washer, and nut from the top and then tighten using the impact driver and hex bit.
For this step you'll want to find the center of the middle channel, place the bracket on top and drill holes using the 5mm drill bit first to create pilot holes. Again, I do this on top a piece of scrap wood and drill slowly while holding everything in place and making sure nothing moves.
Once the M8 pilot holes have been drilled you can make the holes bigger with the M10 drill bit. After the two holes have been increased, insert the M8 bolts from the bottom, place the bracket over them and the usual: lock washer, washer, and nut. Then tighten the bolts down with the impact driver using the hex bit.
Note: This pictures were taken before I did a final assembly so I didn't have washers installed. Making sure that the rake has no flex is important since this will be used to push dirt and soil around. Wiggle it around and test to see if anything is loose or if there is any flex.
Tighten the bolts if necessary, once you start using the rake on dirt it's not as easy to re-tighten things because the hex holes get filled with dirt. Once everything is tighten down, attach your broom handle, throw down some dirt on your yard and push it with your rake. One thing I did notice is that if you have fairly long grass it does snag a bit so it's best to use this on your yard after you've mowed the grass a bit low.
You should notice that the rake helps even out low spots fairly easy and levels out the dirt. I have even used this to level my pea gravel on my side yard and it worked out great, no flex and no issues with anything coming loose.
Making a Levelawn or Lawn Lute wasn't as super difficult and honestly I'm surprised at the fact that manufacturers can charge so much for such a simple to make tool. I get that the ones being sold are made of stainless steel but I don't see an issue with making it out of aluminum.
I'm not an expert on the subject of metal and their durability but for a tool that I'll probably use maybe once or twice a year, I think I'm okay with it being made out of aluminum and I just can't justify the cost. Even if you bought everything in my materials list you'd still be saving money over buying a leveling rake online.
If you want to save even more money, find the aluminum locally, buy just the amount of bolts, washers, and nuts you actually need and you can build a rake for less than I did. Unless you own a golf course or you're constantly leveling your lawn for whatever reason.
Hopefully this guide was helpful! Any critique or comments are welcome, I'm always looking for ways to improve on a project.
Oh, man, where were you when I had 7 tons of gravel to level?!?!?! This is one great build-able. I've just used my own homemade lute to level out the dips in a 12mx24m lawn. Reply 1 year ago. Question 1 year ago. Parts list shows 4 x 24" channels. Images show only 3 channels used. Am I right in assuming the parts list number is a typo? Answer 1 year ago. That's a mistake. I meant to add a sentence about having a spare in case you make a mistake.
I'll change the list to 3. Thanks for pointing that out. I've stashed away some free bed frames, I've found on free online listings that, I'm planning to use for a rider tow behind scale.
Thinking 48 inch and will keep this in mind for maybe later touch ups. Going to check with the Fab Lab now also to see if they have the welder available for the next open lab. Thanks for sharing! Tip 1 year ago on Step 5. I think I could accomplish the same thing using light lumber and a common hinge. If I had scrap plywood it would make construction very easy. I have one handle made from a 2 X 3" that is full-width where it attaches, but got trimmed down to an octagon for the hands, and it is fine.
You can totally accomplish the same thing with wood. I actually considered doing so when I first began the project, I had some 1" x 1" stakes laying around that I could've cut to size.
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