The instrument itself consists of a long flat board of hardwood, an inch or two thick, which has a large hole cut out of the upper half (though sometimes this was made in a couple of pieces - see below). The lower half is hollowed out to form a sound cavity. A thin board is then glued to the top and further secured by small nails all around the edges. There are no soundholes. Six strings are attached to a small tailpiece which is secured to an tail endpeg, like on a violin, or to an integral knob on the end of the instrument, and run over a very small bridge set on the lower half of the instrument. There are six pegs at the top end of the instrument, to which the other end of the strings are attached (there is no endnut of any kind). The instrument is played vertically, sometimes with a strap on the back to allow the left hand to hold the instrument and stop the strings. There are two ways of playing the instrument. One is like a harp, with the left hand supporting the instrument and the right hand plucking the strings. The second way is to use a plectum in the right hand strumming across all the strings, with the left hand behind the instrument, the left hand fingers lightly touching the strings that the player does NOT want to sound in the chord (the touched strings do not vibrate, so do not sound a note, more like a dull thud, but adds to the percussive rhythmic of the strum). Mostly this second technique might have been used to accompany the recitation of poetry or song.
The text on the back was done with sepia ink (simulating aged willow bark ink) in an A/S text style, though in modern English. The poem is vaguely A/S in style, employing the alliterative four beat line with strong cesura, and use of the "kenning" a kind of poetic metaphorical device. Writing on oak with a pen isn't lots of fun.
I am presently working on one for myself. The original plans I drew up are below.
After drawing up these sketched plans based on my own research, I discovered Michael J. King, had starting producing a CD including more detailed historical plans, so I adapted one of his plans for my purpose and started to work!
SECOND ATTEMPT
Kind of like the citole, I decided I wanted to make a pretty instrument for myself, and wanted to experiment with using some exotic materials. For example, a number of the discovered bridges for the instrument were constructed from amber, and I thought that, while a bit heavy, it is hard enough to make a useful bridge. I also wanted to play more with bone and ivory on the instrument.
Adapting the plans, I was able to acquire some very pretty, highly flamed maple wood for the body from Bell Forest Products. Interestingly enough, Michael King used hardwoods for the soundboard (for example, using maple rather than spruce), so I thought I'd give it a try and see how it sounded. So I got some curly maple guitar body back/side wood from Euro Tonewood, actually via eBay, and went from there. Here are those pieces:
The top piece is the soundboard wood (about 1/2 inch thick at this point), and the bottom piece is the body block wood (about 1 and 3/4 inches thick). The body will end up about 8 inches wide, and will be assembled from two pieces (the body and the top arm) cut from the same block. You can see the pencilled in designs faintly on the wood.
First off, the soundboard was roughly cut out (the dark streaks here are scorch marks from the saw that originally cut the board I think). I used a coping saw for this.
Next I had to cut out the main block. The small problem was that I needed to leave the cut out portion of the top intact as the top arm was going to be shaped from it. Since I do not have a band saw, only a large hand saw and a small hand saber saw, the nearly two inch thick maple was going to make it difficult to "make the turn" at the bottom of the cut out area. So I started off my drilling two 1/2 inch wide holes at the corners of where I was going to cut, and used the saber saw to cut a straight line between them. I used the saber saw to cut out a little ways toward the arms and upwards, and then I used the large saw to cut down to those points to get out the piece intact. Also note that my dining room chair is my "workbench" for clamping!
This is the rough cut body block. The "teeth" at the base of the opening are my way of shaping the curve there. I cut slots, and then use a chisel to knock out the wood between the slots. It's considerably faster than sawing though the thicker wood with the coping saw.
This is the rough cut top arm. Again it was cut out with the large saw, and slots cut into the "inner" curve, which will be chipped out with a chisel to more quickly shape that portion. The large "tabs" at the bottom will be the tails of the mortise joint.
While I am working on that portion, here are some of other smaller bits. The pegs are cattle bone (very white) violin pegs I acquired from the Taiwanese workshop of luthier Antonio Tsai, who usually sells his stuff through eBay. The large piece of ivory will be used for the tailpiece, and is scrap from the rosette of citole #4. It comes from Cue Components. The large chunk of amber I acquired from a Baltic amber store in Mystic, CT. It is surprisingly light and very brittle, so I suspect it is going to be very difficult to work with. The two other pieces were a lucky find. I don't do metal-work, having NO space to do that in my house, so I wasn't sure what I was going to do to about the shoulder metal mounts. Than I stumbled across these pieces at a merchant at the SCA Pennsic War called Quiet Press.
A closeup of the metal piece. This is gold plated bronze with enamel. It is a copy of one of the Sutton Hoo pouch mounts, but is pretty close in design and of course in almost identical style to the actual Sutton Hoo lyre mounts. The two are facing each other, and will be mounted at the mortise joint where the body and top arm meet.
The tailpiece sketched onto the ivory. I'm using a design from an Anglo-Saxon sword chape (tip of the sheath) as the pattern. The darkened spaces will be carved out. Depending on initial stress tests of the piece, this may end up with an thin ebony backing for strength.
Working on the tailpiece - using the mini finger drills, I drilled out a bunch of holes into the openings, and am slowly widening them out using the micro files. It takes about an hour per hole, and there are over 60 of them...
In working on another project (specifically the tailpiece for citole number four), I encountered some annoying problems trying to get some inlay to work. So for this past holiday season, I received as gifts a very nice jeweler's saw and a inlay cutting mount. I had originally thought to use this for inlay, but it occurred to me that it might work just as well to cut out the holes in the ivory. And, um, wow, it not only worked, but sped up the process by about one thousand percent. Feeding the thin blade though the finger drilled holes, I was able to cut out the hole shapes rather accurately, requiring only minor clean-up with the micro files. Thus this over 100 hour process of shaping the holes turned into something like 10-12 hours of work. You know what they say about having the right tools for the job... The top half has been cleaned up - the bottom half still has a little work yet to do. Given how fast that part went, I probably will do the interlacing three-dimensional work on it as well.
The "decorative" portion of the tailpiece has been completed, and the piece roughly cut out of its block. The interlace pattern has been given a 3-D cut. The piece is still strong, so I don't think it will need a backing to hold the (relatively low) string tension. Space has been left at the top and bottom for the holes to insert the strings. I will do the final shaping of the piece once those holes have been cut and tested under a bit of tension.
The top arm has now been cleaned up. Note that the tiger striping that is visible runs perpendicular to the normal grain of the wood. The tabs have been left overlarge at the moment.
The body block has now been cleaned up, and the area that is going to be hollowed out has been pencilled in.
The body block has started to be hollowed. Using my normal technique, I drill many holes in with a 1/2 inch drillbit to quicken the process of wood removal. Then I go at it with the 1/2 scoop chisel. Had two problems with this one. First, the stopper I had on the drillbit slipped without my knowing it, and one row of holes ended up too deep (actually breaking through the back in one place). Those are the holes that you see the little dots in roughly the middle of the hole. I plugged the hole for the moment, but may need to do a cleaner insert. At the moment it kinda looks like a knot in the wood. Rather frustrating, but these things happen. A note about the pillows: I tend to work on the floor of my living room (as I've mentioned previously). When whacking at the particularly hard and curly maple with the chisel and mallet, it is particularly loud, and tends to be sufficiently reverberent on the floor to potentially annoy our neighbors. So I put the instrument on these pillows to cushion the sound a little. Still loud in the house, but it deadens the noise the neighbors have to put up with. It does, however, mean that some of the energy of each blow is lost to the slight give of the pillows as a support.
A slightly angled view of the body block as it stands to this point. I've done all the hollowing, and am now cleaning up the sidewalls and doing the final thinning of the walls and floor. In this picture the lower arm hollowing has been completed, but the upper arm still needs to be carved out some more. Most of the gross removal of wood was down with the spoon chisel and mallet, but the side-wall carving and the arm hollowing was down with hand chisels. A lot of the bulk removal of the material at the tail and the upper curve was done with the dremel, as carving cross grain there was dulling my tools horribly, and was moving extremely slowly. The outer walls will remain between 3/16 and 1/4 inch thick, as they have to be able to receive the small nails that traditionally hold the soundboard in place. Also visible here is the blow-through hole. Still not quite sure how I finally want to plug it, but I think the end result is probably going to be a "maker's mark" inlay on the back.
Decided on a plug. I debated between putting something decorative there (like a "maker's mark" or something to that effect), but as it was fairly large and off-center, it would have probably looked a little weird. As it was, I decided to do as clean a plug as I could - so I found a bit of the scrapwood and cut a thin disk to insert. The dremel router was used to clear out the space, and the plug was glued into place and sanded down flush (the plug picture is before I sanded it down). Came out pretty clean - the grain didn't match up quite as nicely when I sanded it down a bit, but it's really only noticeable on very close inspection.
The body block has not been fully cleaned up - the side walls and floor thinned out as much as they are going to be, and everthing basically smoothed down (not polished, but generally sanded). We're ready for the cross-bar now.
It seems that a number of the historical finds were not constructed from a single piece, but added the cross-bar arm as a separate piece with the grain running perpendicular to the main body. The cross grain means that the wood is less likely to split with the drilling and tension of the pegs. The joints were mortised into place. The joint I modelled this after is based on the Prittlewell reconstruction. I was going to originally just drill holes on either side and peg them together, but I think this is more historically accurate, is stronger, and tests my skills a bit more. First the tabs of the joint on the cross-bar were shaped and cleaned up, as shown here. Next the matching holes were drilled and chiseled out off the body block "stems." Getting the two parts to line up exactly was a true test of patience on my part, and involved continual re-fitting, shining light through the joint to see where the misaligns were, filling it down a hair, refitting, etc. Took several hours.
The body and cross-bar being put together. I had been given as a present this interesting band clamp, which uses a 1.5 inch nylon band on a tensioner to hold irregular shapes together. It worked particularly well to clamp this.
Lots more sanding and filing cleaned up the joint, and it came out cleaner than I expected. You can see the inner mortise joint visible on the inner edges of the arms. The joint on the front face is strengthened and "hidden" by the bird metal braces.
The full body is pretty much done now. Just have to do a lot of random sanding and filing to even and straighten out the sides and the cross-bar.
Thinning down the soundboard, done mostly with my rasp/planer. It needs to go down to about 1/8 inch, and is starting out at about 7/16th inch, so lots of material removal. The soundboard will be "inlaid" into the body, so it will initially be left a little thicker to allow for any error in the carving down of the body (ie, it might end up thicker at the edges and thinner in the middle if the carved down space on the body is accidentally cut too deep. The bunnies like the large pile of curly scraps!
The soundboard is now down to about 3/16th. Now to make a space for it on the body block.
The soundboard is set into the main body block, so I need to carve down a shelf for it to sit on so that it is flush with the upper part of the instrument. My initial thought was to use the dremel router to carve it down an even amount, but the very thin walls and not really having something to cleanly brace it on (the table on which I work is slightly warped, and the bottom of the lyre is slightly dished, the combination of which means that it is very hard to clamp it really flat and run a support block next to it to level the router). So ultimately I ended up simply penciling in a clean line and carving/filing down to that line all around the necessary space. The mini-chisels were used to create a clean edge at the top. Also the cavity was given a final pass of rasping/sanding to even it out as best I could before the soundboard went on.
Attaching the soundboard to the body block. I presently have eight violin circle-clamps, and used those to clamp the corners at the arms, bottom of the inner curve and the tail. Otherwise all the clamping was done standard style - using handweights!
Filing down the ragged edges of the soundboard, and the soundboard is attached. It is still too thick, and needs to be shaved down the last bit of thickness, and then the whole body needs to be given a final clean up and lots (and lots and lots and lots) of sanding to remove all the scratches from it (what I refer to as "glassing" the wood).
In the meanwhile (as I can only sand for so many hours at a time), finishing out the other fittings. Originally I had intended to use the bone guitar pegs as the basis for the pegs, with intent to recut them into the square headed pegs appropriate to this instrument. Unfortunately, upon working on the first peg, it seems that those pegs were not cut from a single piece of bone - the stems were turned and the peg-heads were separately fashioned and then glued on. So when I attempted to recarve them, the top fell off. Striking that idea, I turned to some sections of antler that I had as a substitute. Unfortunately, the antler did not have any sections that were straight and thick enough to create the peg without running into sections that were spongy. I considered using ivory, but the pieces for each peg would have cost about $40-50 each, and I didn't feel like spending $250-300 for pegs. So I resorted ultimately to using the holly wood pen blanks I had left over from the citole pegs, and began turning them. Here is my little mini-lathe that I use to turn the pegs. The pen blanks are about six inches long for scale purposes.
Unfortunately, my old camera's lens broke. I have acquired a new (much nicer) camera, but it meant that there was a break in the images, and some of the inbetween stages were missed in documentation for the shaping of the pegs and bridge.
Pegs - the pegs were turned and then shaped into tapered square heads. Each was made from holly wood, and is about three inches long. The stems of each of the pegs were tapered using the violin/viola peg shaver, and they have been cleaned up and sanded smooth. The holes were then drilled into the arm of the lyre, and tapered there using the peg reamer. Each peg has to be individually matched to it's hole to make sure they are all even in depth. They will be oiled in the final pass, after the small holes for the strings have been drilled through them.
Peg Turner - the pegs are set up such that it would be difficult (though not impossible) to turn them by hand. As such, I fashioned from some scrap maple a peg turner. It is cut and tapered to fit the heads very cleanly. It has an octagonal stem (which allows it to fit in the narrow space between the mounted pegs and rotate without bumping them), and has a joined "T" handle, which was dovetail jointed onto the stem. The octagonal dovetail joint was a pain to do, but came out pretty nicely and was a fun little challenge.
End Peg - was separately turned from holly wood, and is about twice as thick as the string pegs. It ends in a flattened ball, which looked boring by itself, so I cut a shallow knotwork relief pattern into it. The stem was also tapered using the violin/viola pegshaver. It is fit into a hole drilled in the end of the bottom of the lyre, where just it's head is exposed.
Tailpiece - the tailpiece was completed. The holes for the tailgut were drilled with the finger drills and widened with the micro-files. The six holes for the strings were drilled in two tiers to keep them close together, and the holes widened with the micro-files. The tail piece was then finally shaped, and given a polishing sanding.
Bridge - the bridge was cut from a large chunk of clear colored amber. It had a number of cracks and inclusions which I had to work around. The amber is very brittle, so it is more or less impossible to "carve" using carving knives- that just chips away material and fractures the surface. So all the work on it was done with the jeweler's saw and files. I did determine that it could be polished to glass after having been roughed, so wasn't worried about that. I used as a model a small amber bridge presently in the British Museum. They are very small - only about one inch tall and maybe one and a half inches wide. This looks like a little gatehouse, with two sloping square towers that are joined by a wedge-shaped crossbar. The piece was successful cut out, thinned and shaped to form. There was one inclusion on one foot that fell out in shaping, leaving a small hole, but I didn't want to lose too much material in the foot, so the hole will have to remain. It shouldn't affect the integrity or structure in any way, though. It was then polished with increasingly fine sandpaper up to about 8000 grit. The result looks remarkably like plastic, which is both interesting and somewhat frustrating. It is clear enough to read text through, though.
Body - is now ready for final sanding and finishing.
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