How We Make Dulcimer Fingerboards

I've been working a lot on dulcimer fingerboards this week, so I thought I'd give you a little idea of what is involved in making them.

For starters, we have to be very careful which wood we use to make fingerboards. We look carefully at the grain to make sure the wood will make a stable fingerboard.

We will cut the wood to blanks that are about 50% bigger than we want to end up with and let the wood sit overnight.

Fingerboard blanks waiting to be cut down to size

Every time you remove some of the wood, you release tension in the wood that remains - sometimes this leads to warping. So every time we trim the fingerboard down, we let it sit overnight and then flatten it again. We'll end up doing three passes of trimming on each of our fingerboards.

After we get the fingerboard down to size, we'll store it in our shop - usually for months, but sometimes for years - before we use it.

Then, when we do call the fingerboard ready to go, there are so many things we can do with it. We can do half frets, partial frets, overlays, inlays, different scale lengths.

Just a small sample of fingerboards

These four fingerboards were some of the ones I did this week. You can see four different scale lengths (25, 27, 28 and 29). Three of them have the 1 1/2 and 8 1/2 frets. There are two different position dot patterns. One of the fingerboards has an ebony veneer. All in all, there are just so many options on what we make - each one is a lot of work, a lot of fun and a piece of art!