The Return of the Betterizer

 Hi. I recently experienced a tiny brainwave in my workshop, and I'd like to share it with you.

I've got a couple of lute backs here, and both are for a 5 course late medieval plectrum lute. The one nearest is made of curly ash; the one behind is of curly sycamore.

In the foreground is a contraption that I have described in a previous post, a locking turntable and block that are screwed up to the underside of the lute mold, and then held in a large ratchet clamp in my bench vise. The setup looks a little ungainly but it works great, since it allows me to hold the mold in practically any orientation. It's very useful when I'm building the back, fitting and gluing ribs, and working side-to-side (that is, working alternately on bass- and treble-side ribs), since I can simply loosen the knurled nuts under the turntable to spin the mold around. It's even more useful when I'm carving a lute mold, because that's an operation where it's helpful to see and carve the developing shape from as many angles and perspectives as possible.

So here's my brainwave. I decided to try attaching this universal-joint contraption to the lute back after it's been taken off the mold, to see if I could use it for scraping the back, resolving the rib lines, and giving the back a beautiful shape.

Now, I always do some initial filing of rib joints and scraping of ribs while the back is still on the mold; it's necessary, for instance, to get a shape that's pretty close to perfect at least on the bottom end of the body, in preparation for fitting and gluing the capping strip. 

But once the capping strip is glued on, I'm usually happy to get the back off the mold and reinforce it from the inside: glue paper strips on all the rib joints (and sometimes across the ribs too), glue in the counter cap, fit the false belly, and so on. Generally I don't work with the shape of the back again until later in the construction process, when I'm finishing out the whole lute in preparation for varnish.

The trouble with leaving rib/ body work till that late stage is that by then I'm working with an almost fully assembled lute, and there's no way to hold it completely steadily. The best way to hold it securely is in my lap, against the padded edge of my workbench. And as you can see, that puts me in the middle of a lot of wood dust (which I'm becoming more and more sensitive to every day.)

So, in an effort to separate me a bit from that cloud of dust, I thought I might try doing some of this work earlier in the process, by holding the back steadily in the vise.

Here's what I came up with. The false belly--the closely-fitted piece of panel board that temporarily maintains the shape of the body during the construction process--has been spot-glued into the completed back. I then pre-drilled four screw holes.

I screwed the block/ turntable assembly to the false belly, with a coupe of #10-2" screws. 

I then mounted the thing in the clamp in my bench vise. My only question at this point was whether the whole thing would be tight and sturdy enough to withstand the pressures of being worked on with files and scrapers (or whether, for instance, the spot-glues on the false belly might not hold.) The answer is: yes, it is strong and steady. I feel I need to be a little careful in handling the back when re-positioning it, but otherwise the assembly is very stable. 

That's my brainwave. It doesn't seem like a big deal, does it? And yet in a way, it is. It gives me a little more flexibility in assembling lutes, because it allows me to change up the sequence of construction. So, instead of waiting to the very end of the building process to resolve and tighten up all the rib lines, I can do it earlier on, and with more control. Or, I can do it later. It doesn't matter. The important thing is, I now have the choice. And the best part is, it didn't cost me a dime!

As some of you may know, I love betterizing: taking a contraption and adding to it or modifying it to extend its life or usefulness. I encourage you to betterize in your own workshop, and share the news with the world.

Here's a short video I made of the contraption in action. Enjoy.

Here's a Thing I Made, or, How to Hold A Lute Mold, or, The Return of the Betterizer

I have a question for all the lute makers out there: how do you hold a lute mold?

I've looked around at a lot of makers' websites and visited a few of their workshops, and I've seen a few different contraptions. Some are simple, elegant and useful, while others seem awkward and difficult. Here's a selection:

A plain stick of wood fitted in the underside of the mold, and held in a bench vice. This is the method used by Robert Lundberg, illustrated in his book Historical Lute Construction. Here is a photo of his protegé, Prof. Günter Mark, using the same method:

(Courtesy Liuto Forte)

I once used this method, for the second lute mold I ever made, and found it pretty inadequate. The mold can be tilted forward and back in the bench vice, but that's it. (I guess in a pinch you could turn it 90° in the vice, and tilt it side to side, if you really wanted to.) Not very convenient when you're carving a mold, and want to tilt it a little to scrape a rib facet, or slightly change the angle of light from your shop window or bench lamp. I'm sure this way of holding the mold worked fine for Lundberg (and does so for Prof. Mark), but my eye needs more angles, more ways of seeing. I want a way of holding a mold that allows a full range of motion, so I can set the mold in any position.

Here's a good example of a jig that I imagine works really well: two locking hinges. I've seen quite a few makers using this type of holder; here's a shot of Malcolm Prior with his. (Malcolm thinks this method might have originated with the renowned English maker Stephen Gottlieb.)

(Courtesy malcolmprior.co.uk)

I once tried to make one of these jigs out of stacked layers of plywood (again, early on in my lute making career), but lacked the skill or resources to do a good job. Malcolm's version looks very well made and useful--note the tightening levers on the bolts through both hinges. The mold (and lute back in progress) is held very securely, but is fully adjustable, tilting forward and back, as well as side to side, and rotating 360° where it sits in the bench vice (you can't see that part in this photo). I can't comment on its ease of use, never having used one, but it does allow a full range of motion and orientation in any position.

Here's the slickest of all the lute mold holders that I've seen. It belongs to Grant Tomlinson, and he tells me he bought it years ago from a supplier in Vancouver who's no longer in business; it was called a "universal carver's vice."

There's a big steel ball (like a trailer hitch) that bolts into a plate screwed to the underside of the mold. The ball is sandwiched between two half-inch steel plates, one of which is sunk into a big block of hardwood, which is held in the bench vice. A couple of heavy bolts cinch the plates around the ball; one of the bolts may be loosened (note the nut with lever attached in the view below), and the mold may be moved freely, and then secured in any position.

There's the owner of the mold (and mold holder) himself, Grant Tomlinson. As you can see, he's just getting ready to fit up and carve a new top block for this mold. In fact, he's getting ready to make top blocks (and bodies) for a new group of lutes. Here are the other three molds in the group:

Each is fitted with its own steel plate, so it's a fairly small matter to remove the current mold from the holder, and set up another. In this way, Grant can fit and glue a rib on one back, and while that's drying, set up the next mold, and fit and glue another. I doubt that Grant will be working on all four backs at once, but he might work on two at a time--most probably they'll be made of the same material (for instance, yew wood), so that he can set up his planes and other tools a certain way, and not have to change for a harder or softer material.

I got a chance to use this mold holder, and Grant's molds, when I worked with him in 2008-2009 (once again, my thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts for the grant that financed this residency.) One of Grant's instructions about using this piece of equipment is that it's essential to hold onto the work securely when loosening the nut and releasing the vice--if you don't, the mold will just fall over, and the consequences to it, and the back in-progress, could be devastating. (And no, in case you're wondering, I never let the mold slip!) If you've got a good hold of it, everything's fine: just re-position it, tighten the nut, and you're ready to go. 

(By the way, I've looked online for a mold holder like Grant's, and while I have found carving vices that kind of look like it, I've never found one that looked heavy-duty enough to withstand the weight of a mold and the wear and tear of using it pretty constantly for years, as Grant has done with his. If anyone has found a good version, please leave a comment and link at the end of the post--I'd love to have a look.)

What I used for years was a setup that Grant showed me a long time ago--the rig he used before finding that space-age carver's vice that he has now. A block of hardwood is screwed to the underside of the mold, and a large ratchet clamp grips the ends of that block. The bar of the clamp is encased in a built-up block of plywood, and that plywood block is held in the bench vice. It's low-tech, but effective--just the kind of thing I like. Have a look.

Everything's very secure. You can see that I've drilled through the hardwood handle of the clamp and inserted a 3/8" bolt, which gives plenty of leverage when tightening up against the hardwood block. 

Here's a look at the plywood block that holds the clamp, and sits in the vice--it's an essential part of the rig. It's built up of layers of ply, and as you can see, some thicknesses of card to ensure the clamp's held tightly. 

The setup has some drawbacks, but a few things work really well. Once you've clamped up the block a few times, there gets to be a kind of recess pressed into both ends, where the jaws almost automatically fit whenever you clamp up. Also, the clamping pressure is so good that you can tilt the mold by simply pulling it toward you or pushing it away (as shown in the photo above), without having to loosen the clamp. I've found it very handy to have this small amount of flexibility available, when carving the mold or fitting a rib. It allows a quick glimpse at the work from a slightly different angle, which can be a great help in the middle of the process.

Now the drawbacks. The mold tilts away or toward you, or forward and back in the bench vice, but it doesn't rotate, which means it's always facing in the same direction--unless you release it from the clamp or the vice, lift it up, turn it about in your hands, and then clamp or vice it again. (That's what you have to do if, for instance, you've fitted and glued a rib on one side of the body, and want to do the same on the other.) It's a royal pain--I did it for years, and while it's a good workout for your biceps, it's also pretty awkward, and potentially hazardous to the ongoing back assembly.

The main problem, though, is that like the Lundberg/ Mark setup, there's no way to alter the orientation if you want a slightly different view when carving a mold--to see how light and shadow fall upon the complex shape, or to follow a rib facet as it comes up in a long, graceful curve from the neck joint toward the abrupt transition at bottom end. I find mold carving to be a very demanding and difficult process, and as I said above, I need as many different angles and ways of seeing as possible in order to do a decent job of it.

So, a little while ago, I put the betterizer part of my brain to work, and came up with a solution that performs very well. I've talked about "betterizing" before in this workshop diary--I define it as a specific kind of improvement one makes to a tool or a jig in response to a displeasure one has felt building up, almost unconsciously, over many years, toward a certain shortcoming in the tool. It's like a burr under the saddle or a stone in your shoe, an irritation that can be ignored or withstood for a long time, but once decisive action is taken... there is only the freedom and sheer joy of having a tool that performs exactly as you want it to.

Here's what I came up with--a turntable that allows the mold to rotate 360°, and can be locked firmly in any position. As you see, it fits in between the mold and the hardwood block.

Here's a look at it separate from the mold.

There are two knurled nuts, on two bolts, one on each side of the hardwood block. Remove those nuts, and the top plate (along with the hardwood block) can be lifted off, to show the inner workings.  

The turntable base is made up of two thicknesses of 1/2" birch plywood, with one extra thickness of 1/8" ply on the bottom. The upper layer of 1/2" material, as you see here, is cut in two pieces in the bandsaw--an inner circle and an outer ring--to leave a channel about 1/2" wide, wide enough for the shanks of a couple of carriage bolts to travel freely around it. The lower 1/2" layer is cut in two pieces in the same way, but the space between the outer ring and the inner circle is a little more than 1" wide--wide enough to allow the head of the carriage bolt to travel freely. If you flip the base over, this is what you see: the outer 1/8" plywood layer. All of these wood screws are what hold the layers and pieces of the base plate together.

One other crucial feature of the turntable is the length of 1/2" maple dowel which centres all the layers, connecting the top plate and base plate together. It's the axis upon which the turntable turns. This is the underside of the top plate, showing the centre hole into which the dowel fits; the #12 screws that attach the top plate to the hardwood block; and the two holes through which the carriage bolts will fit up when the two plates are put together.

Here are the carriage bolt, spacer disc (made of 3/8" ply), and knurled nut.

Just a word about the knurled nut: it's simply a hexagonal-head nut which I embed within a couple of layers of ply (you can see the threads of the nut winking in the photo below.) I "knurl" the outer edge of the disc in the band saw, and then relieve the rough corners with a file. I could use wing nuts for this purpose, I suppose, but I prefer these shop made nuts because they are secure and easy to twist, which you end up doing a lot with this rig. I think wing nuts would be harder on the fingers, after a long day at the workbench carving a mold.

And here's what it's like, with the plates fitted together, waiting to be fixed to the underside of the mold--

Which I do with a couple of stout #12 wood screws on each side of the turntable (so there are four screws altogether holding it to the mold.)

Once it's fixed to the underside of the mold, just clamp the hardwood block into the big orange ratchet clamp and get to work. To turn the mold around, just back off the nuts about a half-turn, rotate the mold to the desired position, and tighten the nuts back up again. It really is that simple.

I remember the day I first made one of these things and tried it out: I was so thrilled, I must have spent an hour just loosening the nuts, repositioning the mold, tightening the nuts again. The turntable, and the mold, could be spun effortlessly, but there was no danger of anything falling over or falling apart; and when I tightened up the nuts, with only moderate finger pressure, the mold would stay very securely in its position. I could tell I had made a good jig, one that worked and would be safe and durable to use, whether I was carving a mold, or fitting and gluing a rib, or as I'm doing here, carving a top block for a new lute back.

It's like a miracle--I can position this mold in any direction I want, except, perhaps, upside down (but I will work on that.)

So there it is, another troublesome operation in the shop all betterized. It really is not an exaggeration to say that this invention has made my work with molds and backs much easier and more satisfying in so many ways. It's like a toothache is suddenly gone. I can't believe I made lutes before I started using this rig.

If anyone reading wants to make one of these things for him or herself, please be my guest. If you need any further hints on how it's done, just leave a comment here. And if you make any improvements to this rig, please let me know.

Go forth and betterize!

How I Learned to Like My Bending Iron (or, The Return of the Betterizer)

Hi friends,

I was bending ebony soundboard edge-bindings for a new batch of lutes this week, and realized again how much I like my little bending iron.  It wasn't always this way--when I first got it, probably about a dozen years ago, I didn't care for it very much at all.  Over the years, though, I've modified it in a few ways to really make it work for me. 

The bending iron is one of the standard ones you can get from a guitar making supplier, like Luthier's Mercantile or Stewart Macdonald (I forget which one I bought it from).  It came a bit raw out of the box, a bit unformed.  The first problem I noticed was that the sides of the iron (which, incidentally, is not made of iron, but of aluminum) were really pretty wobbly, not straight at all, which didn't help the results of my attempts at bending.  I gave it a good workover with some files and sanding blocks, and got it to the point where the faces were reasonably true.  Making good bends, especially with wider material (like for 9- or 11-rib lute backs) became a whole lot easier.

I also screwed a plywood base to the thing, so I could clamp it more conveniently and securely to the work bench. 

The main thing that I disliked about the bending iron was the way it sets up to bend small strips of wood, such as edge bindings or rib spacers.  It comes with (or maybe you have to buy these separately) a pair of aluminum hoops that fit around the bending iron, one on top of the other, which you tighten in place by means of a nut and bolt.  This is what they look like when they're not on the bending iron, which they haven't been on mine for a few years.  (I didn't care to put them on just for the sake of the photo op, so here they lay, lifeless.)

There are a couple of problems with this setup, the main one being setting the width between the hoops.  To work best, the hoops need to be very evenly spaced apart, and the distance needs to be just ever-so-slightly wider than the material you're working with.  If it's not (and this is the way it usually went for me), then on one side of the iron the material will be pinched, while on the other there will be too much wiggle room.  I had real trouble adjusting these hoops accurately--you can hold them in place, but as soon as you start tightening the nut, they'll move.  A small, but constant, source of frustration.   

A second problem arose when I first began building lutes in batches, because occasionally the rib spacers for one back would be a different thickness from the spacers I was using on the other.  This meant as I went back and forth, fitting ribs alternately on the molds, I would need to adjust the space between the hoops back and forth too, to accommodate the different sizes.  Frustration multiplied.  It was clearly time to call in--the Betterizer!

I have found that when I'm stumped about how to modify a piece of equipment, it sometimes helps just to take things apart and have a look at the insides.  That's what I did with the bending iron, and found that it's basically hollow--just a teardrop-shaped aluminum tube with a small heating element that plugs into it.  All that space gave me an idea.

I flattened the top surface of the iron and drilled a couple of holes into it, then threaded the holes and screwed a couple of 1/4" bolts up from the inside.  Then I drilled slightly larger holes, the same width apart, into a couple of pieces of 1/8" brass stock I had on hand.  I shaped these pieces carefully on the bench grinder so they were the same teardrop-shape profile as the top of the bending iron.

Then I drilled holes into some other pieces of brass stock, of various thicknesses (to be exact, the thicknesses were 0.2mm, 0.4mm, and 0.8mm).  I also shaped these pieces on the bench grinder, but I made them a little smaller than the 1/8" pieces--about 3mm smaller, all the way around.  (I stacked these pieces and clamped them together for shaping on the grinder, so they would all turn out with the same profile when I was finished.)

Here's what I made, a veritable Roman hoard of brass shims (or perhaps a beautiful school of brassfish swimming by.)   You can see the two larger 1/8" pieces at the bottom of the photo:

 Stack up some of the smaller shims on top of the bending iron, and here's what you get:

 Put a larger 1/8" piece down on top.

Add yet more smaller shims on top of that--

And another 1/8" piece.  Screw the pieces down tightly with some wingnuts--

And there you have it, a bending iron with grooves built in for bending ebony edge bindings (shown here), sycamore rib spacers, or just about anything else your heart desires.  Need to adjust the depth of the slot?  Just remove the wing nuts, add or remove or stack a different combination of shims so that the slot is just that tiny bit wider than your material.  Are you building multiple lute backs that use different widths of spacers?  No problem--this set up gives you two slots that you can set to whatever depth you want.  No muss, no fuss, no guesswork, no switching back and forth, just... calm.  Peace.  Oneness with the universe.   Betterization accomplished.

I usually have a few spacers left over, so I just stack them on top before screwing down the wing nuts.

I really like this setup.  I feel that I've taken a tool which, when it came from the supplier, was really not that well made or well-designed for the job, and turned it into a piece of equipment that's essential to my professional workshop.  For any builders out there who have experienced the frustrations I have, I recommend this fix.  And I wish you well in your own adventures, shaping your tools to your needs.  Do let me hear about them, if you like... and Happy Betterizing!  

The Betterizer

I get a kick out of work, but I also get a kick out of talking about work.  I've been lucky in my life to have toiled alongside people who like to play with the language to talk about their labour--it's always fascinated me, and always made the workday more fun (and pass more quickly).

The habit of mixing work and words started early for my brothers and me, growing up on the farm in northern Saskatchewan.  The three of us read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school English class, and whatever else that novel taught us, it gave us an expression to describe a certain kind of work: bustin' up a chiffarobe.  It's what Mayella Ewell asks Tom Robinson to come into her yard to do, and as we know, it's an act that has some very serious consequences for all concerned.  For us kids, it was just an outlandish expression: what on earth is a chiffarobe?  And why on earth would somebody want to bust one up? 

Anyway, the phrase stuck, as these youthful obsessions sometimes do, and it came to connote a type of work that usually involves hard (and possibly pointless) labour, that's emotionally conflicted or emotionally dangerous, and maybe even physically dangerous too.  To this day I can phone up my brother Roger and ask him what he's been up to, and if he answers "bustin' up a chiffarobe" I know exactly what he means.

Another example.  A few years back I was helping out some friends at their screen printing business.  During some down time, I spotted a rack that held several large rubber squeegees.  To me, they looked in danger of falling off their narrow shelves, so I took it upon myself to tack a strip of wood on the front for a lip, to better hold them securely.  Somebody asked, hey, what's Travis up to?  and somebody answered, he's over here betterizing a shelf!

Betterizing--I liked that.  It fit exactly what I was doing.  I wasn't improving something; I was making something better.

It's a strong impulse with me, the betterizing impulse, and has been since childhood.  It's stood me in very good stead as a lute maker.  I think it's an impulse that every lute maker must have, to a greater or lesser degree.  The Lee Valley Catalogue will sell you many things, but it can't sell you everything, and so you have to be prepared to betterize an existing tool to make it fit your specific needs.

Such fixes don't need to be elaborate.  This week, for instance, I was gluing bars on the underside of  a couple of lute bellies, and then planing them to their finished heights.  As part of my routine of finishing the profiles of the main bars, I chamfer their edges (a feature that's seen universally on old lute bellies).  To do this, I've been using a Veritas miniature shoulder plane from Lee Valley tools.  While it's a wonderful little tool, it's really not the right one for this job--the sole's a bit too narrow, and if you go off track with it, the exposed corner of the blade can dig in and hack your work.

This using-the-not-quite-right-tool-for-the-job is the kind of thing that could go on for years, like a leaky faucet.  But instead of running (credit card in hand) to the StewMac catalogue, I thought, the plane's fine, but what it really needs is a fence on the side, to guide it along the edge of the bar.  I looked around the shop, and found a little slip of spruce, a soundboard off-cut, that did the trick. 

Now, how do I hold it in place?  My fingers?  Tape?  Some kind of clip...?   Over there, on the desk... will it fit?  Yes!  Perfect.

But does it work?

Yes indeed it does, like a hot damn, in fact--better than some brass fingerplane I now don't need to shell out 50 bucks for.  The whole unit's solid and stable, and the fence is easily switched to the other side of the plane, for working on the opposite side of the bar.  A tool betterized, a job made easier, money saved.  My heart sang a tiny song of victory.

Now, onto bigger fish.

I actually made this piece in 2009, when I was working with Grant Tomlinson.  Grant was going to be away for a few days, so I was on my own in the shop.  Rather than create some sort of sorcerer's apprentice type of situation by working on lutes while he was gone, I took the time to build something that I'd wanted for a long time: a router base for my Dremel rotary tool. 

Mainly I wanted this tool for cutting the small channel for the edge binding around the soundboard.   Now, numerous companies (such as StewMac) will sell you a Dremel router base, and it might work for this purpose... but most of the ones I've seen are either too heavy, or can't be adjusted properly, or don't have stops that register correctly against the soundboard and outside ribs.  In short, they may work fine for a guitar, but not for a lute.  If I wanted something that did exactly what I wanted, I'd have to build it myself.

This looks like a job for--the Betterizer!

 Here's what I came up with--

I didn't begin with any master plan--all I had was an adjusting screw mechanism that I'd cut out of an old block plane, and I built around that.  I knew I wanted to use this screw to adjust the cutter up and down, so what I had to do first was find a way to mount these pieces in the polycarbon material I was using for the job.  I just made some tight-fitting cutouts for them, and that worked fine.

Once I figured that out, I was off to the races.  I built a carriage that I could screw the Dremel tool into (the neck of that tool is threaded), and a base with a hole cut in it, through which the cutting bit is lowered.  I also drilled a hole for a bolt through the back of both carriages--the hole in the back of the base is actually a slot, as you can see.  When I've adjusted the cutter to the correct height, I can tighten the wingnut on this bolt, and that locks the cutter securely in place.

This is a view of the bottom, and it shows the guide attachment I made for cutting the binding channel in the soundboard.  The little tongue of material that my thumb is pointing towards?--that's what sits on top of the soundboard.  The little round, serrated thing to the right of my thumb?  That's the cutter head.  It's peeking up just above the width stop--I can loosen the two screws you see here to adjust the width of the channel (the screw on the right actually has a slot, so I can move the plate forward or back, exposing less or more of the cutter). 

Here's a couple of shots of the thing in action--

 

And a shot of the slot that it cuts.  Pretty nice result!

(By the way, if anybody's interested in having a closer look, I've added a few more photos of this tool on a flickr page, here.)





Okay, one last thing.  If you insist.

One of the most useful pieces of equipment in the lute shop is a pull-through scraper.  It's used to create batches of uniformly-sized strips of wood, such as soundboard bindings, or rib spacers.   Maybe these scrapers are available commercially, though I've never seen one.   I got the idea for mine from an article I read in American Lutherie a few years back--a Spanish-trained guitar maker was talking about how he made the tiny strips of wood for mosaic-pattern soundhole rosettes.  What a job: hundreds of strips of wood of different colours, glued together side by side into sheets, then the sheets glued togther into loaves, then slices taken from the ends of the loaves and glued side by side into a circular channel cut into the soundboard around the soundhole--far too much work.  Give me lute making so I can slack off a little!

This is the unit I made, and it resembles quite closely the guitarmaker's setup.  (More pics can be found here.)  There's a plane blade on its side between a couple of hardwood blocks; the front edge of the blade sits close to another flattened hardwood block.  (The blade can be slid forward and back, and secured in place by tightening wing nuts on the bolts.)  To use the tool, put your strip of wood between the blade and the block, snug up the tip of the blade against the strip of wood, tighten the bolts, and pull the strip through.  If you've set it up right, the blade will take off a thin shaving.  Flip the piece end-for-end, and run it through again; then do the same for all the other strips in your batch.  Then snug up the blade once more, and then run all the pieces through again.  Do this process a few dozen times, with a few dozen pieces of wood, and presto! you have a nice batch of uniformly-sized, flat- and parallel-sided strips.

One recent job I did demanded something a little more accurate.  Often these strips come out of the process with flat, parallel sides, but they're kind of trapezoidal in cross-section.  This is not a big deal if all you want is a normal set of rib spacers, but I was working with something a little more complicated--a triple spacer, made of rosewood sandwiched between strips of holly.   If I wanted the three strips to be equal thicknesses, I needed to make sure that the sides were square to the bottom and top.

I wanted the final thickness of the spacer to be 2.4mm, so each strip needed to be 0.8mm wide.  I first thicknessed (with a thickness sander) a slab of rosewood to 0.8mm, then glued slabs of holly to either side, making a holly-rosewood-holly sandwich.

(I left the holly pieces a little extra-thick, about 1.0mm each.)  I then cut the sandwich into strips about 2.5mm wide, and began the pull-through thicknessing for each piece.

To keep the strips square-edged, here's what I did--just behind the blade, I wedged in place a small, flat block of maple.  As I pulled each strip through the scraper, I used a slip of hardwood to press the strip downward onto that block.  I figured if I did this every time I pulled the strip through--and if the surface of that block was at a right angle to the blade--I'd end up with square-sided strips.

 And that's exactly what happened!  Betterizer strikes again!

 Of course, I also had to be quite careful, while running the strips through, to scrape an equal amount off each side, so that one outside strip didn't get wider than the other.

Thankfully, there aren't too many lute models that use this kind of spacer--making them was fun, but a bit demanding.  These spacers I used for a new 12 course lute, based on a 15-rib Sellas archlute back.  The original, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, has ivory ribs, with ebony-ivory-ebony spacers; my version has rosewood ribs, with holly-rosewood-holly spacers.  Check it out.

And that is all--except for one thing.  This weekend is Father's Day, and it's also my Dad's birthday.  Wallace William Carey died in 2001.  He would be 77 this year.  While he was not a lute maker--he was a farmer and mechanic--he was a Betterizer of the first order, and watching him work, and watching the way he worked, was a big part of my education as a craftsman.  He was determined and dedicated, and happy at his workbench.  I miss him, and still learn from him every day.