Hurdy Gurdy: Router? I Hardly Know Her!

This run of rainy days we've had have really kept hurdy gurdy production hurtling forth. Last night I glued the bottom on, and weighed it down with a pedal steel guitar and some hammers...gotta make due with what you have, right?

Well, kinda. This morning I went down to the Mega-Lo Hardware and got some supplies to carry me through to the end of this project...namely some wood filler, a chisel, some new jigsaw blades (maybe this will cure my fear of the jigsaw), and a few other things that I'll detail below.

This morning I took the pedal steel off of the hurdy gurdy. It looked like this:


Note the overhang -- the soundboard (top) and bottom of the instrument were provided slightly oversized -- maybe three-quarters of an inch at most. This is helpful, because, as I've tediously relayed, the instrument is not a perfect teardrop shape. Now, the instructions to this kit are pretty good, for the most part. But it suggests that, if you don't have a router, you can take care of the overhang with course sandpaper.

Now, even you have all the time in the world and sandpaper grittier than a David Mamet screenplay, I don't know if you could eliminate a three-quarter inch overhang just by sanding it. Well, you could, but it would be a ridiculous amount of work. I pondered it for a while -- use the jigsaw? Circular saw? I wasn't gonna sand it endlessly. My solution was to use a hand-held router -- really a lino cutter, with a wood-cutting bit.

I'd never used this router before, but it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of starting with the top -- I should have started with the bottom, as I made some errors and had to learn to control the device, and the results of my novice hand are more visible, since they are on top. There are some pock-marks made by the router...I tell myself it adds to the folksy quality of the instrument.

Here's how the first pass with the router looked. Yikes:


I then went over it with some sandpaper -- first with an electric sander, then by hand. I got it down to something reasonably smooth, if a little, um, folksy...then I glued the peghead on. Here's where we're at:

Hurdy Gurdy Diaries...Day Six, or Something

...Musikits rates the kits they offer by difficulty. They use a hammer scale. This hurdy gurdy has the maximum number of hammers. So I'm stepping into the deep end on this one, especially since I don't really have any carpentry or wood-working chops. The ranking said there would be "character building" moments. Hell yeah it does.

So, I left the hurdy gurdy in the straightening rig all weekend to try to fix the sides. It seemed to work, although it didn't get all the way straight. So, I flipped the instrument over so the top side was up, and glued the soundboard on while it was still in the rig. I was thinking maybe that attaching the soundboard would provide the last little bit of tension to move the head-block over.

Here it is. I weighed the soundboard down with a cymbal, some hammers, some tool batteries, a big magnet, and a tape measure. The spirit of Ybor City lives on:


Once that dried, I flipped it over and started looking at installing the bracing that went under the soundboard. First I had to taper the braces at either end, making them look more triangular at the corners -- like this, basically: /___ instead of this: |___. After another rough outing with the old jigsaw, I did it with a circular saw and it cut it like a hot knife through butter.

Then I widened the hole in the brace and the tail-block with a five-eighths inch counter-sink bit. That allowed me to slide nylon bushings into the brace and the tail-block. I used epoxy to secure the bushing into the brace, then positioned it so that the axle could spin relatively frictionlessly. I glued it in, along with a triangular brace that went on the other side of the wheel-hole. I cut the wheel-hole with the aforementioned jigsaw, and it wasn't exactly straight. But I think it will work. I weighed the braces down with some hammers:


It's sitting and drying now.

While that was happening, I glued the keychest together. This is a box that sits on top of the instrument and holds the keys that fret the strings. There are no guide pins or anything to hold it together -- you just have to glue the parts together and hope they stick! I used rubber bands to hold it all in place for the time being, and also put in the keys, just to be sure the sides were aligned.

Day Three: The Hurdy Gurdy Moves

...so I left the hurdy gurdy in the straightening rig overnight, and it did move over about one centimeter: half of what I wanted it to do. Considering I had put in half the bracing strips, I took that to be progress.

This morning I took it out of the straightening rig, flipped it over, screwed it back in, and installed the bracing strips along the top. My wife looked over my shoulder and said "This looks like the height of tedium." I actually like the minutia, the problem solving, the tactile nature of it all. Whether it will result in a playable, presentable instrument is yet to be seen.

Here's how it looks now:

Hurdy Gurdy, Day Two

...the saga of the basement-built hurdy gurdy continues! I e-mailed MusiKits yesterday about the missing brass crank, and they responded almost immediately, saying they'd put a replacement crank in the mail. So that was nice! I also ordered a varnish kit to use later on -- if I ever get to that step!

So now that the tail block is set, last night I put the sides into the head block. While the sides were "pre-bent" according to the kit description, it took a surprising amount of tension to get them into the block. I was a little nervous, but it seemed to work. I also drilled a hole into the the side for the crank, which was surprisingly hard. 5/8 of an inch is a bit bigger than it sounds! Here's how it looked once the head block was glued and the hole drilled. (Sorry about the night-vision setting. That was an accident.)


The next step was to make sure the body was symmetrical. I traced an outline of the form onto a piece of cardboard, and then flipped the instrument-to-be over and compared the lines. It was definitely NOT symmetrical. The hurdy gurdy is supposed to be egg-shaped, but the head block was about two centimeters off center, which was noticeable to the naked eye. This has been a game of sixteenths of inches so far, so two centimeters was pretty substantial.

The instructions said, if the sides are mis-shapen, to use strong tape to pull the instruments sides into the proper shape. But the masking tape I tried was not strong enough, and I didn't have any other options. So I took some time and built a simple rig that held the tail block in place, while pulling the head block two centimeters over to the left. It looks like this:


It's not pretty, but it should work...fingers crossed. Then I laid in some support strips along the inside top (I can't do the strips on the bottom while it is in the straightening rig). Since I didn't have more than a few clothespins, I used chip-clips and clamps. Yikes.


I'm going to leave it in this rig overnight and see if it comes out straight by tomorrow. Cross your fingers.

Hurdy Gurdy, Man -- Day One

I don't consider myself a craftsman, by any stretch of the imagination. I'm handy around the house, I guess. I can fix things, hang picture frames, mount towel racks, all that fun stuff. And I can keep the various instruments I have in working order, occasionally re-soldering a connection or tightening a loose fitting. But I use experts for things like electrical work, plumbing, and truss rod adjustment.

The only instruments I've built are really just toys -- a shoe-box sized koto made from a kit and a fretless banjo made from a cardboard mailing tube. But I'm home a lot more now, with my new freelance occupation, so I decided I'd take on a more sophisticated kit instrument. I perused Musikits.com, and, inspired by a French-Canadian band I saw at a local festival, settled on the Hurdy Gurdy: obscure, complexly mechanical yet devilishly simple...I ordered the kit, and the photo above is how it arrived.

I think this is a good time to say I've never heard the Donovan song "Hurdy Gurdy Man," but it's been sung to me several times since I announced this project to my friends.

So, first step was to take inventory of the parts. In classic, IKEA-esque fashion, it was missing the brass crank, so I wrote the company. Let's see how long it takes to get a replacement. Everything else -- dozens and dozens of bits of wood, metal, cotton, felt, plastic, rosin, and gut -- were all present.

Not wasting any time, I took on the first step and glued the sides to the tail-piece. This should have been easy, except I spent 45 minutes cleaning out my old bottle of woodglue, before realizing it wasn't usable. Again, I'm no expert. So I went to the hardware store and bought glue and two clamps. The woman looked at me and said "Doin' some clampin', eh?" What answer is there for that question?

Then I tackled the step I feared the most -- I cut the wheel-hole in the soundboard. I hate jigsaws, and have never been good with them. This hole is a little misshapen, but will fortunately be masked by a wheel-hole cover. When I was a kid, working in a warehouse, I broke a jigsaw blade and it was terrifying -- the metal shot out across the room. Safely safety goggled, I fired up my never-used Riobi saw and, well, the blade broke. This time it was less terrifying -- just a little crack and a pile of fragments. So I plugged in my wife's dad's old jigsaw, a metal behemoth that pre-dates most modern safety measures. It cut a little jagged, but I sanded it clean and I seem to have done okay. Not perfect. But hey, that's life...

Have Mercer

In 1970, the Lyrics and Lyricists series was started at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The idea, proposed by Broadway conductor Maurice Levine and master lyricists E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, was pretty simple: have great lyricists discuss their craft, perform their hits themselves, and curate a program of their music. The series was started at a fortuitous time, because a lot of the Great American Songbook lyricists were still alive, and were able to participate. While trained Broadway/cabaret vocalists did some of the singing, most of the time the lyricists themselves sang, which was pretty odd: many of them weren't performers -- they were writers in an era when writers stayed in their office and wrote, and performers performed, and the two rarely met.

The Lyrics and Lyricists series continues. You can see more about it here. It changed over the years, from first-person narratives to revues speared by experts or performers dedicated to one lyricist. I'll admit that I much prefer being in the company of the lyricists directly, but, well, a lot of them aren't around any more. So I can't fault the organizers for changing things.

The good news is that a lot of the early performances were recorded and released. A lot of the LPs/CDs drawn from this series are out of print, but I've been slowly amassing them...I'll probably do an entry sooner or later that runs them all down. It's fascinating stuff.

Johnny Mercer was one of those rare songwriters of the '30s and '40s who was also an accomplished performer. While that made his Lyrics and Lyricists gig a little slicker than most, it was no less charming or insightful. The other night I had the record of it on...it closes with a 29-song medley of songs that Mercer wrote the lyrics for (and in some cases words AND music for). It's probably 20 minutes long, and just devastating...I swear I almost cried. It's amazing to think of one man being responsible for so many great songs. It was just staggering. Here's the medley...check this out:

Lazy Bones
Goody Goody
Too Marvelous for Words
Jeepers, Creepers
Satin Doll
You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby
That Old Black Magic
Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive
Fools Rush In
I Remember You
Day In-Day Out
Dearly Beloved
Come Rain or Come Shine
Tangerine
Hooray for Hollywood
Laura
Dream
Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe
Something's Gotta Give
One for My Baby
In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening
Skylark
The Autumn Leaves
I Wanna Be Around
Blues in the Night
Charade
The Summer Wind
Moon River
Days of Wine and Roses

Chances are, most people have heard at least a few of these, right?

Dis Ain't Da Drum...

...can a bad drum sound sink a record? I don't think so. That first Moby Grape album had drums that sound like a piece of notebook paper hit with a pencil, but the songs, singing, and guitar playing are so mighty that, well, one overlooks the anemic drummin'. I'm also thinking of the weird gated drum sound on Michael Penn's "No Myth," which is hard to tell if it's just '80s drums or if they are being blown out like that as some sort of special effect.

The subject popped into my head because I went to the record store this morning and picked up the new Jules Shear album More, which for some reason he recorded as Jules Mark Shear. (After what, three decades as just plain old "Jules Shear"? Whatever.) More has what has got to be the worst drum sound I've heard on record this year...simultaneously tinny and cavernous, very modern sounding in a bad way. Digital. The bass drum has the same sorta "pop" to it that I imagine Tom Brady's ACL does -- not a warm heartbeat, but a cold snap.

Fortunately the drum sound doesn't ruin the album...the album kinda ruins the album. I could only get four songs in before I turned it off, but this is a very mannered attempt to ROCK again, from a writer/performer who was always more a pop guy. The title track has hung around his repertoire for years, and wasn't all that great acoustic -- much less electrified all out of proportion. I guess I need to stop buying his records...

Since his mighty trio of disks with Jules and the Polar Bears, to his '80s solo albums (great big '80s pop with brains), to his amazing albums for Island in the '90s, he's been constantly surprising and enlightening...but since Healing Bones, it seems like something left the building. He did a little acoustic album a year or two ago that was a step in the right direction, which he has clearly disregarded with this beast...More was produced by Sean Slade, who made a name for himself making '90s alternative rock albums, of which quite a few now sound dated. This new Shear disk has a distinctly out of time feel, and not in a good "lost classic" way...I'm sad now.