Chapter 3

Roughing out the first Pieces

Finally, Out to the Shop!

Transferring the Pattern onto the Work piece 

The first step was to tape the plan down on top of the piece of Maple I had chosen.  I picked a piece with nice straight grain, and made sure that there were no visible checks, splits or weak areas in the board.  Once the pattern was taped down, I used an awl as a punch, and made small holes in the pattern all the way around the part I wanted to cut out.  I kept these punch marks about 1/4" apart, except for in the tight curves, where I punched them a little closer together.

Here I'm punching around the perimeter of the neck of the harp, on 3/4" (4/4) thick hard Maple.

After the punching, I used a little bit of string-line chalk on a tissue, and rubbed it into all of the punch marks.  The bright blue chalk will show up very well on the light colored Maple.

The chalk doesn't show up in this photo as well as it does on the work piece, so you'll have to take my word for it.  The bright blue spots make a very visible line that will be easy to follow on the band saw.  First, I'll take the board to the radial arm saw and cut off all of the excess on the other end of the board.  Then it's over to the band saw to cut out the first half of the harps neck

Making Sawdust at Last!

    Cutting out the profile of the neck on the band saw.  Staying as close as I can to the chalk marks, but always on the waste side of the line.  In this step, it's not necessary to be too critical about following the line exactly.  After we laminate the two halves together, we'll then sand them both down to the line, creating nice smooth curves.

    Now I can just use the first half of the neck as a pattern to lay out the second half on the remainder of the board.  Two important things to notice here.  First, only the first half that I cut out has the tenon on the narrow end. (Near the left side of the photo.) This tenon will locate the neck in the top of the soundbox, or body of the harp.  The second half of the neck will have no tenon.  I know this seems lop-sided, but the reason for this abnormality will become clear later.  The second thing isn't as obvious, but I flipped the first piece over to trace out the second piece, and moved it to the other side of the board. I flipped it to allow for opposing grain curvature, and I moved to the other side of the board just to be on the safe side.  Even though I inspected this board thoroughly, there could still be the possibility of a weak spot in the grain of the board.  By moving the pattern to the other side of the board, I minimize the possibility of two weak areas lining up together in the lamination step.

 

    When I cut out the first half of the neck, I had a little trouble turning the tight radius in the front end of the piece.  So before I took this second piece to the band saw, I took the time to open that radius with a large diameter Forstner bit on the drill press.  This made cutting the second piece a lot easier. 

    The next step is laying out the pieces for the Pillar of the harp.  These pieces are very regular, with a long graceful arc.  I will maintain an even width from top to bottom, so it's a lot easier to lay these out with the old bent stick trick.  A string around a yardstick works very nicely.  I just wound the string around a pencil until it got tight enough to flex the yardstick to the arc that matched the arc on my drawing.  I made these pieces both about 2" longer than the plan.  Each end of the pillar will later have a tenon cut on it.  One tenon will fit into a mortise in the underside of the neck, and the other will fit into the base of the harp, just in front of the soundboard.

Move on to Chapter 4

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