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.

The end ...

The last few entries have been catching up with things that have happened over the last 3 months.

Fast forward to the present day and it is May 6, 2011 - exactly 9 months since the harpsichord kit arrived on August 6 last year and I am going to declare it "finished" - for now at least ...

Overall I am very pleased with the instrument - the back 8' has a nice warm, clear, singing character to it and is, I think, already very close to where it should be - the front 8' is a little more incisive and, when played on it's own, the top octave is perhaps a little brittle - it will probably need more work but right now it just needs to be played for a while. The two voices combined blend very well together and produce a very satisfying effect.

Tuning appears to be quite stable with the caveat that this instrument does appear to be very sensitive to changes in humidity - much more so than the French double that is in the same room only a few feet away - a change of 5% relative humidity can shift the pitch of the Neapolitan by 15 cents while the double hardly seems to notice - even when this happens the instrument does stay pretty much in tune with itself and if you don't mind leaving it slightly sharp or flat you can get away with only touching up a few notes - on the other hand it is an extremely easy instrument to tune and a complete tuning doesn't take more than 15 or 20 minutes.

At the outset I did intend to keep track of exactly how much time I spent working on the instrument but I completely failed to do that. The one thing that I do know is that I spent at least as much time planing and thinking about the best way to do things as I spent actually working hands-on during the construction phase which lasted almost exactly 6 months. The last 3 months were all taken up with voicing and just playing the instrument. Construction could certainly have been done in much less than 6 months elapsed time - I had originally estimated about 4 months but I had some other commitments that took up more of my time than I had expected.

Anyway, here it is, alongside its larger and older cousin ...

Voicing 3

Once the stop lever for the back 8' was installed I had to make few adjustments to the voicing since the precise position of the register in the "on" position had changed very slightly - just enough to make 5 or 6 notes unreliable. In each case the plectrum was just slightly shorter than it needed to be and all that was required was to push the plectrum just slightly further through the tongue. I also had to adjust the dampers slightly so that they still damped the string when the register was moved into the "off" position.

Here you can see a close-up of some of the front 8' jacks before voicing. The register for the front 8' is in the "off" position and the plectra have already been cut to approximately the correct length so that they are clear of the strings.


This is what it looks like after voicing with the dampers in place. The front 8' register is now in the "on" position.

The last thing that needs to be done is to regulate the action to get the plucking order right. The two sets of jacks should pluck their respective strings at slightly different times when the key is depressed otherwise the touch will feel unpleasantly stiff and heavy when playing with both registers engaged. The back 8' has a natural tendency to pluck first because the angle at which the back of the key rises when the front of the key is pressed. The exact length of the plectrum also helps to determine the precise moment at which the pluck occurs and finally the length of the jacks can also be adjusted slightly if necessary.

I had tried to make the plectra for the front 8' just slightly longer than the ones for the back 8' and most of the notes were already plucking the strings in the correct order but in many cases they were still very close together and the touch was quite stiff. While I had done my best to get the jacks set up so that the spacing between the plectra and the strings was consistent there were a few of the back 8' jacks that were a little short - padding the bottom of the jacks with 4 or 5 thicknesses of masking tape brings the plectrum closer the string so that it plucks earlier. In a few places I also shortened the back 8' plectrum to get it to pluck sooner. Similarly with the front 8' shortening the jack increases the distance between the plectrum and the string and delays the pluck as does pushing just a little more of the plectrum through the tongue.

It took quite a while to get this right - at first I still had both jacks plucking much to close to each other and the touch was really stiff - you don't want the plucks to be too far apart but they do have to be quite distinct. Eventually I got a few notes to both sound and feel right and then it was easier to make the others behave the same way.

Voicing 2

Once the back 8' seemed to playing reasonably well I turned my attention to the front 8'.

Zuckermann provide a wooden lever stop level which moves the register for the front 8' so that it can be turned on and off. There is, however, no provision for controlling the register for the back 8' and before voicing the back 8' I had carefully set it into the correct positions by inserting shims at either end of it.

This means that, in order to voice the front 8', you have to remove the jacks for the back 8' which is less than ideal for several reasons - it makes it difficult to find the right balance between the two voices and it leaves the strings for the back 8' completely undamped which means that when you play the front 8' you have to contend with the sound of sympathetic vibrations from the back 8'.

After a frustrating week of not making much progress I decided that, at the very least, I needed to be able to turn the back 8' on and off on a temporary basis while I was voicing the front 8'. Since the jacks for the back 8' pluck the strings on their left this means that the register needs to be moved slightly (somewhere between 1mm and 1.5mm) to the right in order to get it into the "off" position. Since there was already a shim of approximately the correct thickness at the right hand end of the register all that was necessary was to remove it. Unfortunately, however, the gap between the end of the registers and the case is hidden by the wooden plates on which the jack rail supports are mounted which makes it impossible to get at the shims without removing all of the jacks, removing the spine plug and removing the registers from the instrument.

Once I had the back 8' register set up so that it could be turned on and off and had made some progress with voicing the front 8' I decided that it would be worth making an additional stop lever for the back 8' and making it a permanent feature of the instrument.

Here is the original stop lever for the front 8':




I made a copy of it - slightly longer than the original because it has to reach the back register


and here it is fitted in place