A Photo Walk Down The Shop Floor

For this week's "What's Going On In The Shop", I'm trying something different. I just walked down the length of our shop and took pictures of some of the things I saw that looked interesting. So no overall theme this week, just lots of pictures with descriptions of what we are doing.

In this picture you can see Richard getting ready to lacquer. He is putting painter's tape on the fretboards before spraying so we can keep the wood unfinished. After the instrument is finished, he will apply fingerboard oil to the fretboard.

Every now and then we get some wormy wood. In this case, we had a nice big chunk of butternut and were able to get several sets of wormy soundboards. We can't count on getting more wormy wood, so this is not an option on our website. We will probably make an instrument or two out of this wood for our store wall, and if anyone calls and asks for wormy wood on an instrument... we'll have some for a short while.

We have several pneumatic tools in our shop, plus we have a spray booth that uses compressed air and we also use compressed air for cleaning, so we need a large volume of pressurized air. Here you can see both of our big air compressors. I'm not sure how old the red one is, but it is getting worn out and doesn't run efficiently any more, so it has been relegated to our backup compressor and we are using the grey one in the back. When air is compressed, it heats up and is able to store a fair amount of moisture. Then when it cools, the excess moisture turns back into a liquid. Liquid in the air system can damage the tools, so we try to remove as much moisture as we can. All of the pipes that zig zag up the wall give the air more time to cool off and lose its moisture. We have a drain at the bottom of the pipes to get rid of the excess water. During the winter we don't get much water out, but on a hot, humid day, we can get a quart or more of water out of the system.

This is my primary workbench, and you can see the dulcimer I am almost finished with. It has been fully assembled, and is just needing some hand sanding before going back to our lacquer booth.

When we glue veneers to fingerboards, we tend to do it in batches. Here you can see about 20 fingerboards with veneers. They are mostly walnut with ebony, but the closest two are maple with zebrawood and walnut with padauk.

When we buy lumber, we get nice big planks, and then we start to cut it into smaller pieces. We will cut the size pieces we need and then the scrap goes on this cart. We organize the pieces by size, so that if we need to make a side set/head/fingerboard we know which shelf to go to.

These walnut boards that we sliced yesterday are ready to be glued together to make a top and back for a hammered dulcimer. They are about 3/8" thick now, but after gluing, we will sand them down to 1/4".

These heads are pretty much done. Just a little sanding and they will be ready to go on instruments.