Puzzle Joints & Cardboard Dulcimer Kits

Festival season is starting to roll, so we're trying to keep up with instruments. Not a lot of really new stuff in the shop this week, so I'll show off a couple of projects we have running - not new stuff, just cool!

On top of his normal duties in the shop, this week my Dad, Jim, has been working on hammered dulcimer stands. I hear you thinking that hammered dulcimer stands are pretty boring, but take a look at the joinery we are using.

A stack of parts ready for assembly

A finished puzzle joint

This type of joinery is called a puzzle joint. Just looking at the shapes, I'm sure you can see why. It makes a very strong joint that has strength in several directions.

One of my projects this week is replenishing our stock of cardboard kit dulcimers. We cut out all of the cardboard pieces, so all you need is glue to make the body. The fingerboard itself is a standard hardwood dulcimer fingerboard.

Here are all of the parts to make a cardboard dulcimer body. I just need to pull off a few pieces of scrap and box it up.

Here is a finished cardboard dulcimer - this one happens to be a chromatic, but we also have normal diatonic cardboard dulcimers.

This next picture is a dulcimer hanging in our finishing room waiting for its first coat of lacquer. This one is unique in that the customer asked for the Folkcraft logo to be inlaid into the head. It also has a few other inlays on the soundboard, but I'll save that for another day.

Folkcraft logo inlaid into head of instrument ready for finish