Marking out

Time to line up the drawing on top of the bottom board and mark out the positions of the knees (the triangular blocks that support the sides of the case) and the braces that stiffen the bottom.
Here is a close-up of the spine side of the drawing lined up exactly along the edge of the bottom.
From the close-up view of the opposite side - the cheek - you can see that the bottom is over sized by a few millimeters.
After marking out the upper side of the bottom I flipped it over to mark out the position of the stand.

Putting together the pieces

I am going to let the wood acclimatize to its new environment for a couple of weeks before I start to assemble anything but I did want to get an idea of how well the case parts were going to fit together so I set up the bottom board on my workbench and clamped the spine and cheek onto it and then laid out some of the other internal components.




The bottom of the instrument is supplied slightly over sized so there is a slight gap between the wrestplank and the cheek. As the instrument is being assembled the cheek edge of the bottom will be planed down until it is an exact fit.


Finally here are some of the internal bracing structures laid in place.

Unpacking

The kit arrived a few days ago - all the way from France via San Antonio, TX.


Most of the smaller components are packaged up in two boxes with some of the longer pieces of wood at the front.

The bottom of the box had quite a large hole in it but fortunately nothing was damaged.

This is the soundboard - still in one piece after its 6,500 mile journey and still covered in a light film of sawdust.

The first box contains the stand and the action parts including the jacks, the registers and the keyboard.

The second box contains the remaining wooden components.

A new begining ...

It's 2012 and I am about to start the construction of my second harpsichord - this time from a Paris Workshop kit supplied by Gerald Self - like the previous Zuckermann kit this is a Neapolitan style Italian instrument. The two instruments are similar in many ways, but there are also some significant differences.

The most obvious visible difference is that the Zuckermann Neapolitan is what is known as an "inner" harpsichord - an instrument with a fairly thin, light weight case and no lid that, traditionally, would have been placed inside a larger and heavier outer case.


In contrast, the Paris Workshop instrument of the so called "false inner/outer" design where there is, in fact, only a single case but one which retains the appearance of a separate "inner" instrument sitting inside of an "outer" case.

The Paris Workshop Neapolitan instrument is more fully described here.

Both instruments have two 8' choirs strung in brass. very similar compasses (51 notes C-d3 for the Zuckermann instrument, 49 notes C-c3 for the Paris Workshop instrument), very similar scaling and, of course, very similar internal construction.