It Takes A Lot Of Moving Parts To Build A Dulcimer

August 23, 2024

 

Good Morning, Y'all!

 

As we're getting ready for our last Second Saturday Clinic for 2024 (we only do them in the summer months now, after Lorinda Jones had an "fun" experience with a blizzard on Interstate 69 while driving home from our Northern Indiana shop after a mid-winter clinic a few years ago), I was reminiscing about meeting our clinicians for the very first time.

 

Which clinicians, you might ask? 

 

John Keane, and Karen Keane. Two utterly fabulous musicians. Amazing teachers. And incredibly nice people.

 

Here's the story of when/how I first met them:

 

https://folkcraft.com/pages/meeting-john-and-karen-keane

 

It's kind of a cool story!

But back to my opening sentence - John and Karen are leading our final Second Saturday Clinic of 2024. Here are the details. Definitely sign up sooner, rather than later!

 

So let's talk shop organization. Many of you have been to our workshop and seen first hand how we keep things from becoming a giant jumble. A custom dulcimer order starts with this, our "green sheet" that has all the specs for a custom dulcimer build:

When you order a custom dulcimer over the phone, or at a festival (in person!), the specs go straight to a green sheet (pictured above.) Online orders from our Design Your Own Mountain Dulcimer pages come up in our website software, and are transcribed to green sheets. (and you really should play around with the "design" pages on our website - they're fun for dreaming, even if you're not looking for your next dulcimer quite yet)

 

Once we have a completed green sheet, your dulcimer goes into our queue - waiting for your instrument's turn in our workshop. Our wait list these days is a full four months - an instrument ordered today MIGHT arrive for Christmas, but I wouldn't guarantee it at this point.

When a dulcimer moves from the wait queue to "we're making parts now!" the green sheet goes to one of the shelves on these carts (pictured below.) Each shelf has one green sheet, with parts being made for a specific instrument. I'll work on tops, Dad makes the fretboards and heads, Casey and Cheyenne will make the sides and backs. Once all the parts are made, the pieces go back to the workshop, and are assembled, sanded, and lacquered.

Each shelf has a green sheet, and will (eventually) have all the parts to make a specific dulcimer.

 

After all the parts are gathered, we move the green sheet (and matching parts) back to our workshop, and start putting your dulcimer parts together, fitting and sanding as we work through the process.

 

Here's one of the carts in the wood shop (pictured below) with dulcimers in various stages of completion:

Is that YOUR dulcimer I see, second shelf from the top?

We have another cart at the other end of the shop that holds completely-built dulcimers, waiting for hand sanding. Green sheets? They stay with their dulcimers until we're ready to ship or deliver the completed instrument.

 

There are a lot of moving parts, and if we were a much larger company, we would spend millions on fancy ERP software to keep it all organized. As it is, our "green sheets" get the job done with a modest level of efficiency, so we'll keep the process going as is, at least for the near future.

Now you've seen some of the inner workings of "the process" of gathering parts. Let me know what else you might want to see?

Thanks for reading, Y'all - have a great weekend, filled with dulcimer music!

 

Richard Ash - luthier-who-spends-half-his-time-doing-non-dulcimer-stuff-and-would-be-happy-if-he-could-spend-more-time-making-instruments