In-House Cases & American-Made Strings

I just walked through the shop and snapped a variety of photos of things that are in progress - or just look cool!

Our seamstress, Nikki, has been hard at work building up our collection of in stock cases. Nikki worked for years as a seamstress at Vera Bradley making purses before we were able to hire her away. We have been making a strong push to source all of our materials and supplies from companies that build in America. Cases had been one of those items that we were stuck with imported product - that is until we got Nikki. Now we build all of our cases in house, and source the cloth and thread from American manufacturers as well.

This is an impressive picture to me - around 70 different varieties of strings! We have steel, brass wound, bronze wound, nickel wound, ball end and loop end all in a variety of sizes. These strings are also American made. They are made in Michigan, just a few hours from our shop.

We also have our spools of hammered dulcimer wire. We have steel, bronze and brass that we have manufactured to our specs.

This is our "rubout" table. After Richard puts the lacquer on the instruments, he will polish them with "0000" steel wool (you can see a bin of wool at the back of the table) and polishing compound. This cleans up any imperfections in the finish and leaves a nice luster to the instrument. On these LAP-JOs, you can see the bare wood on the fretboard. Richard will also be applying fretboard oil before stringing.

Here are a variety of instruments ready to polish. With about an hour apiece, Richard has a great workout ahead of him.

We just got a small batch of mahogany in this week. These planks happen to be a little smaller than normal for mahogany, with only one around 20" - the rest are in the 10" to 14" range. On the shelf below, you can see several planks of hickory. When they dry the wood, they paint the ends of the boards so that the ends will dry at the same speed as the rest of the board. If you look carefully, you can see some splits in the end of the hickory boards (we will probably lose about 6" off each end). The folks that did the drying either didn't seal the ends of the boards well enough, or they dried the wood at too high a temperature. In really extreme cases, the cracks can run through the entire length of the board!

On this cart we are collecting all of the parts to build big batches of dulcimers. The instruments on this particular cart will be built for us to stock in our showroom.

I will start building the instruments on this cart tomorrow. This batch are all being built for customers.

We have a good dust collection system and several air filters in our shop, but our air conditioning system still gets a lot of dust. We keep a filter on the air return, blow it off weekly, and replace it monthly. Here is what it looks like when we throw it out.

When you walk into our shop, one of the things you may notice is that all of our wall space is taken up with jigs. Here is just one little piece of wall. On the left we have jigs for lining up some holes we drill in scroll heads, and on the right is a collection of jigs we use when building our travel dulcimers.

This is a batch of instruments that I've built this week. They still need sanding, so I have about an hour left for each of them, before I hand them off to Richard for lacquer. You can also see the "pi" tone holes that I sampled last week. The customer gave me the go ahead, so this instrument is almost done.