Designing Custom Tone Holes

This first thing really doesn't have much to do with music, but it is still kind of cool. I have to admit that one of the reasons the newsletter is a little late today is that I played hooky from work for a little while this morning. My dad has an old 1924 RCA Radiola III that he pulled out of storage and wanted to see if I could get it going for him. I rigged up a power supply for the radio (the radio actually needed three different voltages) and it turns out that one of the vacuum tubes is blown. So, no go getting the radio running, but it was fun playing with.

1924 Radiola III

My real project for today has been tone holes. I have a couple of folks that I'm currently doing custom designs for - one with an undersea/Hawaiian theme and another with an African/aboriginal Australian folk art theme, plus a dragon theme that I'm working on for myself (but that gets pushed to the back a lot - I'm estimating I'll be done with mine sometime in 2018).

The first step for creating a new tone hole is talking to the customer. I'll get as many ideas from them as I can. I'll do searches on the internet and show them other images until I have a good idea of what they are looking for. After that, it is time for me to get creative!

I'll start with a piece of paper and just very roughly sketch locations and outlines. I can barely make my signature legible, so I don't expect much here. In fact I recently sent one of my sketches to a nice lady that had a Texas tone hole (thanks Glynda!) and got a joking response back that the state was backwards! That shows just how rough my sketches can be :)

Start initial sketching of tone holes on paper just to get an idea. I am not much of an artist, so for me a sketch is just to help with placement. I'll do very rough outlines just to see how things fit.

After that, I start work on the computer. In the computer I can take my quick sketch and "correct" it. Drag the lines around and add detail until everything is perfect. It takes a fair amount of time, but we can make a tone hole or inlay match a customer's wants exactly.

Actually start putting detail in on the computer. I can tweak and correct until I'm satisfied with the image.

As a woodworker, getting the tone hole in the wood is actually a lot easier than knowing what to put there in the first place. We have the tools to do it quickly and accurately - and it is awfully nice seeing something artistic come out in the end.