And this is a particularly nice place to start: a French double manual harpsichord is to be made from walnut, and not just any walnut: French walnut, to be exact.

Herein lies a tale.

I spotted this wood at my supplier in southern Ontario. French walnut is, to be plain about it, expensive stuff, several times the price of domestic black walnut. But a good piece of French walnut is truly a thing to behold, for it is a spectacular wood - rich in contrasts, from a light cream to nearly black streaks - and it is a wonderful wood to work with. The particular board I had my eye on was curly French walnut. The particular board I had my eye on was part of a flitch, a complete log cut into slabs. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view the matter) in order to have the one slab of wood I had to buy the entire log. My wonderful customer in Washington was supportive of the idea, so... I talked to my bank manager and took the leap.

As they say, you have to start somewhere. If I look a little tired as I rest my chin on the wood, it's because I just lifted, board by heavy board, the whole set of boards onto my bench, where I will procede to choose the specific planks to be cut and milled for the French harpsichord.

Tired I might have been, but I was also excited and eager to see what the grain looked like so I could choose the best planks for the project. As any wood would coming from a sawmill, the surfaces were too rough to have a clear idea of the final potential of the wood. So I use a small plane to smooth off an area of each side of each board, and then apply a bit of oil. The wavy grain shows up mostly on the outside 1/3 of the board surface, but here you can see the beautiful contrasting grain.

After selecting the boards to be used, I mark them out for cutting on the bandsaw. Each of these planks weighs about two hundred pounds or so, and I prefer to do these things myself, so I must be carefully creative about how I do the sawing.

Now I can saw the plank to a width that is usable, not too wide and not too narrow. I have to keep in mind that along the way to making these planks into a harpsichord I will loose about 35% to sawdust, wood chips and unusable chunks. Once the plank is the desired width, about 11 inches, I plane down the high spots on one side, by hand. I have to do this with a hand plane because I do not have the "luxury" of using a 12"-wide jointer - a very expensive tool. When it is reasonably flat, I will attach a jig to the plank to hold it steady and true while I send it through the thickness planer prior to resawing slices off the plank.

The noise that this all engenders is very tiring, and while it is a part of using labour-saving power tools, I really don't like the noise at all - an neither do my neighbors. In the long run, though, the noisy part does not last all that long.

This French walnut seems heavier and harder that domestic North American black walnut, and my resaw confirms my impression. In short order I have worn out a blade on the saw, and end up buying a new one - and still the cutting goes slowly. As the wood has still not arrived at equilibrium with my shop's moisture level, the two outside boards from this plank develop a slight cup as their freshly-exposed surfaces loose moisture, though the inside plank stays absolutely true and flat. That the outside planks cup a bit is to be expected, and patience is now required while the wood gets used to its environment. I will simply stand the planks on end and wait a while for the wood to stop moving. In the mean-time there is plenty for me to do, including work on the soundboard, the jacks, the keyboards and many other parts.

While all this has been going on, I have been working on the soundboard. I feel that the soundboard ought to be one of the first orders of business, because the longer the soundboard can sit around and, well, "weather" for lack of a better word, the better. It will have a chance to expand and shrink several times over the next while, before it becomes a fixed part of the instrument. In this case I am cutting a choice bit of Sitka spruce for the soundboard; all the planks that make up this soundboard come from the came tree, in fact the same plank from the tree, and they are sequentially matched. I plane the surface, saw a 3/16" slice off on my resaw, pane the plank again and resaw again, and so on. The Hitachi resaw is very noisy, so I always use ear protectors.

The slices of Sitka are all edge-marked for the direction of grain run-out, and in fact this is done before I cut the plank apart. This is an important consideration, because I will have to use a smoothing plane on the soundboard once it is glued up and cut to size, and the grain must run in the same direction across the entire soundboard if I want to avoid grain tear-out. These slices are each 6 inches wide, but will be trimmed to about 5 inches before glue-up.

Having carefully glued the planks edge-to-edge, the soundboard now is freeto hang around the shop for a good long period, while I work on other parts of the instrument. I feel it is important to let the soundboard go through cycles of heat and coolness, high humidity and low humidity over a period of weeks or even months before it has the bridges or ribs attached and is fixed into the instrument. I am always aware of the destination's ambient humidity when I make an instrument, and nowhere is this consideration more important than in the treatment of the soundboard.
 
 
 

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