Calling all lute makers!

As some of you may know, I will be teaching the lute building course at the upcoming Lute Society of America Workshop West, July 26-31 at the UBC campus in Vancouver BC (the city where I live!  how convenient.)  An overview of the entire LSA Workshop is available on the website of Early Music Vancouver; today, I thought I'd tell you in a bit more detail what I have in mind for the lute making course.

For those of you who haven't attended the lute building class at the Vancouver LSA, what happens is that we, the lute making group, commandeer an entire corner third-floor classroom in the Music building and set up a pretty much complete lute making studio there.  I spend days before the Workshop packing up my belongings, and on the Sunday before the course begins, I and my helpers move them from my Barnard Street work space out to UBC.  Two work benches, various lute molds and materials, many plans and drawings, clamps and jigs, planes, scrapers, knives, and chisels--practically all my hand tools--are spread out in all their glory on tables in the classroom, ready to be put to work.  There's essentially everything we need in that room to build a lute. 

And that's exactly what I'd like to do--build a lute!  Or, if not actually build a whole lute, then at least make a very good start on one.

Over the week, the class will talk about all aspects of lute making, and to do that most effectively, we'll focus on one lute in particular: the 7 course by Vendelio Venere, 1592, in the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna.   I've put together a working drawing, based on Grant Tomlinson's original drawing of the historical lute, for a new 7 course version; the drawing contains a ton of information, and will be provided free of charge to course participants.  There will also be a sheaf of historical photographs of the original Venere lute available, courtesy of Grant T (participants should bring a thumb drive.)  Participants can also purchase, for a small fee, a copy of Grant's historical drawing of the Venere lute, which he examined and documented during his European Grand Tour of lute measuring, in 1978-79.  I urge you to get one--this drawing has provided me with practical, aesthetic and moral inspiration for years.

I've also revised and spiffed up my mold for the 1592 Venere 7c.  Here it is:

 
I chose the 1592 Venere for the class to study this year for one practical reason: because I think it will make a very fine student lute.  The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that my mold is for 13 ribs; the original lute has 25.   Reducing the number of ribs in this way allows us to simplify construction quite a bit, while still retaining the body's beautiful lines.  It may also, I hope, allow us to put at least the back of this lute together during the week.

To do that, I'm inviting participants in the class to try their hand at bending, fitting and gluing a rib (and a sycamore spacer.)  Whether you have a lot of experience or little--or none at all--with bending and fitting ribs, now is your chance to give it a shot.  Trained and experienced technicians are standing by to give advice and coaching (or even to take over if you start to have major problems.)  We will be using a set of heartwood yew ribs for this lute, so if you've never worked with this material before--and it is somewhat rare and difficult to obtain--come down to the lute shop and give it a try.  (I also have it on good authority that a couple of celebrity lute makers might put in appearance during the week, and fit up a rib or two, if their busy schedules permit.)

My idea is that this lute will be a cooperatively built instrument intended for student use, either as a loaner, locally in Vancouver, or as a donation to the LSA's lute rental program.

Here's a list of some of the topics I hope to cover in the week of our Lute Making class.  If there are topics you don't see here that you'd like to hear about in class, you can let me know by email, or by leaving a comment at the end of this blog post.

Lute-specific topics:
--working with historical evidence--drawings and measurements
--making a working drawing
--building a mold
--preparing ribs and top block
--building the back: fitting and gluing ribs, fitting and gluing the capping strip
--removing the back from the mold, reinforcing the back, fitting the false belly
--fitting, shaping and gluing the neck
--joining and thicknessing the belly
--carving the rose
--barring the belly (using the go-bar deck)
--fitting the belly to the body
--carving and gluing the bridge
--gluing the belly into the body
--fitting points/ gluing the fingerboard
--making the peg box
--fitting and gluing the peg box
--finishing out: varnish and oil options
--fitting pegs, nut, frets and strings

Those cover most of the bases, I think.  There are also some more general topics we'll cover:
--shop safety
--sharpening--plane blades, chisels, knives and scrapers
--using hide glue
--making and using jigs

And by the way, this last topic, making and using jigs, is one of my favourites.  I have a number of handy shop-made jigs and assists that I will be happy to share, and if you have any, I would encourage you to bring them along and share with the rest of us.

Okay--so that's the mornings of the week taken care of.  Now, we go on to the afternoons in the lute workshop.

In addition to taking on the Lute Making class this time around, I'm also continuing with my duties as Lute Doctor, which I've done for the last number of LSA Vancouver Workshops.  This means I'll be doing repairs and maintenance to the lutes of faculty members and Workshop participants throughout the week.  Mostly that amounts to changing frets and unsticking pegs, but every once in a while an interesting challenge comes along, like at the last Vancouver Workshop where I saved from a near-death experience a nice Hiro Watanabe 8c lute with severe action issues.

I expect to be quite busy with Lute Doctor duties this time around too, but I also want to make time to examine and do some work on one particular patient: a 7 course lute made in the mid-1980s and recently donated to Early Music Vancouver.  Although apparently well made, the lute is at present unplayable; it needs repairs, some major, some minor, to get it to the point where it can be strung up and played again.

 Here's a quick look at one of the more obvious issues with the lute--a pegbox that's started to come apart, and actually push its way out of the joint:

And here's another issue that should be dealt with--the bridge seems to be lifting, at least in spots, and needs re-gluing.  Note the separation from the soundboard beneath the second and third course:

So those are a couple of the issues facing this lute--are there more?  This is something I'd like the class to try to figure out, by having us do a thorough examination and diagnosis of this lute as a group.  Let's find out what's wrong with the lute and what can be fixed, and let's figure out whether it's worth anybody's while to do all the necessary work.

I've always felt strongly that if I am going to build lutes I should be prepared to fix them, and my hope is to promote that feeling among the participants in my class.   There is a big demand for lute repairers right now, and I would love to be able to start training a few, new eager repair people, and turn them loose across the continent to fix all the broken lutes out there.  I think it's a great way to give back to the lute playing public, and I also think it's a great way to make you fearless about your own work.  Whatever is broken, it can be fixed--that should be one of the cardinal rules of anyone's lute making.

So that's what's coming up in my Lute Making class at the LSA Workshop West in Vancouver.  Let me know if you're thinking of coming, and let me know what you think the class should cover.  And I'll see you at the end of July!

New Lutes, February 2015

I have two new lutes to tell you about today, and honestly, I couldn't be more proud of them.  Both in their ways are new models for me, which is always a challenge, and to have them turn out as well as they have done is simply thrilling.

First up is a 12 course lute, for Lucas Harris, of Toronto.  In addition to being a conductor and very busy accompanist and teacher, Lucas is the plucked-string player for Tafelmusik, the well-known Toronto baroque ensemble.  Lucas got in touch after seeing the 12 course lute I made for Evan Plommer in 2012 (you can look at pics and a description of that lute here).  He was looking for a new lute that he could use in the many different musical situations he works in: accompanying singers, in ensemble, and as a soloist.  A real workhorse, as he said, a lute with a beautiful and powerful voice.

Well, I hope I've been able to make that for him.  I completed the lute three weeks ago and shipped it to him in Toronto; a week later, he took it with him on tour with Tafelmusik to Australia and New Zealand.  I haven't heard from him since he left (and here's hoping that no news is good news), but I'll expect a full report when he returns.

Built to Lucas's specifications, this lute has a string length of 65cm, and tunes at A=415.  There are eight tied frets, with the ninth a wooden fret glued just on the neck.  We debated a bit over which historical model would make the best body for this lute, and after considering things like overall size and shape, number of frets on the neck, and string length, we found that the C45 Tieffenbrucher archlute body fit the bill best.  Now, I've made a number of 10 course and 8 course lutes on a smaller C45 shape, but this body would have to be somewhat larger, and to make it, I needed to build a new mold.  I based it upon Grant Tomlinson's design for a slightly enlarged version of the C45 that he has used in his shop for many years.  Like the original C45, Grant's lute is made with 31 yew ribs; I designed mine to have 21 ribs, in homage to a couple of ancient lutes: the Hans Burkholzer (SAM 44 in the Vienna KHM) and the 13 course lute by Thomas Edlinger in the National Music Museum in Vermillion, SD (NMM 10214).

Here's how it looks:

   

The 21 ribs are, in this case, of Honduras rosewood, and the spacers are of holly.

I don't know about you, but I get a real kick out of the 12c extension.  It seems like such a slight little thing, and with four bass courses strung to it, there is a fair amount of tension on it.  All of this, and it's attached only to the tiniest corner of the bass side of the peg box.  This is the second of these extensions that I've done, and I've become quite confident of my design and construction of the thing. It's well-built and solidly attached, and even under tension, it hardly bows or moves at all.  Have a look:

Okay, a couple more photos of the whole lute--just a couple.

The second lute I recently completed is a 7 course for Doug Asherman of Oakland, CA.  Based on the smaller C45 mold that I've used for numerous 10 and 8 course lutes in recent years (you'll see many examples if you leaf through some of the older posts on this blog), this lute is a new model to me because I've never done a 7 course version of it before.   I was pretty sure it would turn out well, but I wasn't sure how well it would turn out... and I must say, I like it very well indeed.

The back is of yew wood, with sycamore spacers; the neck and peg box are veneered in ebony.
The string length is 62.5cm, and there are 9 tied frets on the neck.  So far, so much the same as I've done before; but this lute's a little different.  Besides being only 7 courses, this lute is the first I've built in a very long time to be completely strung in gut, and I think the results are absolutely spectacular. 

The trebles and octaves are gut from Boston Catlines; the basses are, on the 5th course, a copper-gimped, and on the 6th and 7th courses, silver-gimped, all from Gamut Strings.

I don't know if it's the gut, or the lute--it's a bit of both, I'm sure--but this lute has a warmth and clarity that I don't think I've quite heard before in one of my instruments.   The yew back adds a shimmer and quickness to the sound that just isn't there with other woods.  All of that, and at the same time the lute has a very big voice, very well balanced and free.  I think that sometimes yew, as a wood for the back of a lute like this, is the victim of a certain kind of prejudice: players tend to think of it as having a nice, rich sound, but one that's perhaps not quite as strong as a harder wood like rosewood or maple.  On the basis of this lute, and some others I've built, I think that prejudice is wholly undeserved.   Yew wood can have quite as strong a voice as either of those, and at the same time a richer and more complex one too.

For anyone who would like a look at some more pics of these instruments--and all the others I've built over the last few years--I would direct you to my flickr feed, here.  For now, I'll just add a couple more detail shots of this lute's back.  The yew wood that I used for this lute was just spectacular.  I'm constantly awed by its beauty.

What's up next?  More fun, and more adventures: a 10 course lute on this smaller C45 mold, and a 12 course bass lute.  I can't wait to get back to the shop.

Take care, and I'll talk to you again soon.

A Small Fix

I have another repair to tell you about, which I did in December, in the between putting varnish coats on a couple of new lutes (I'll tell you about them in a little while).  The repair was pretty minor, but I thought I'd talk about it because it illustrates a couple of important principles of lute making--how to make a well-fitted joint, and how to use hide glue to get a really solid bond.  These skills are applicable in many stages in the lute's construction, and every aspiring lute maker should know them.

The repair was to a 6 course lute owned by Nelson Amos, of Ypsilanti, Michigan, and as a matter of fact, it is one of mine, a lute that I built for myself in 2007.  Nelson bought it from me a couple of years ago, when I decided to make myself a new 6 course lute.  The problem: a detached peg box. A sudden wrong move, a small impact, perhaps, had knocked it out of its joint.  It looks pretty terrible, and of course the lute is out of commission until the problem's fixed, but it's really not that big a deal to put things back together.

Photo: Nelson Amos

The first thing to notice is the quality of the break itself, and the results thereof.  When the pegbox came out, it took a fair bit of material along with it on its underside; however, the back side of it is almost completely undamaged.  This suggested to me that although the pegbox was well glued underneath, the back side was not well glued at all.  In fact, on closer inspection I could see very little glue residue at all on the back side of the peg box, or on the corresponding surface of the rebate in the neck: tell-tale signs that I either hadn't fitted the pegbox well, or hadn't glued it well, or, most likely, a little of both.  

All the wood was still there, and the break was pretty clean, and I guess if I was one kind of lute-repair person, I might consider just sticking the peg box back on with some kind of modern gap-filling adhesive.  For better or worse, though, that's not the way I work. The peg box might stick, but probably not for long, and in any case the joint would look really ugly.  I like to do these jobs right, and if I didn't quite do it right the first time around,  I would happily do it right the second time.

The first thing I needed to do was repair the rebate in the neck.  The back side of the joint was fine, but the 'tongue' of the joint was quite severely damaged, with much material having been torn away.  I needed to build that area up again.  I first chiseled and filed the area back to make a flat surface, then glued (with hide glue) a new chunk of pearwood down on top.

There was also a small chip of wood that had been taken out of the back side of the peg box (proving that that surface wasn't actually completely devoid of glue after all).  I chiselled out a small channel and filled it with a slip of pear, then flattened the area with chisel and file.  I also removed the torn-out wood from the bottom of the peg box, and flattened that surface too.

Then I got to work re-shaping the rebate joint.  Most of the material I removed with a chisel, but when I got close, I used some (shop made) bevel-edge plexi-glass sanding blocks.  The bevelled edges allow me to get far into the very corner of the joint; the blocks have 180 and 220 grit paper, stuck on with double-sided tape.  (The very corner of the joint is cleared using a sharp chisel.)

 I needed to shape the sides of this piece as well, to follow the contours of the neck.

Okay, so here's the first point I wanted to talk about: how to get a well-fitted joint.  The pegbox joint can be a tough one to fit: the rebate cut in the end of the neck is an odd shape, and it's difficult to tell if the two surfaces are flat--a straightedge is of little use, especially on the back side of the joint.  So how can you tell if the surfaces are flat? 

Probably the best approach to seeing whether the surfaces are flat in the rebate is to make sure that the contact surfaces of the peg box are flat first.  And by flat, I mean dead flat--a straight edge held against the bottom of the peg box should not rock at all, whether it's held across the bottom, or along its length, or from corner to corner.  Hold the straight edge against the surface, and view with strong back lighting--no light at all should be visible between them.  (The same flatness test applies to the back of the peg box, especially where it contacts the back side of the neck rebate--it too needs to be dead flat.)

Once the peg box surfaces are flat, you can use the peg box itself to test the flatness of the bottom and back sides of the rebate.  Hold the peg box in the joint, and look at the fit--if any gaps are visible, you need to remove the material around the gap to get a close fit.  Once you've done this, though, and the fit looks good, there can still be problems--especially on the outer edges of the joint.  The only way to really test the fit is to put the peg box in place, and apply pressure to the very corner of the peg box.  With your thumb, press the peg box into one corner, say the corner on the bass side of the neck, first.  Push hard, and observe the other (treble side) corner.  Does that corner of the peg box move out of the joint at all?  If it does, then that means the joint in the corner you're pressing the peg box into is not dead flat, and the peg box is rocking a tiny amount in the joint.  The joint needs further work, with files, sanding blocks, or a chisel.

In the same fashion, apply pressure with your thumb to the treble side of the peg box, and look at the bass side.  Does the peg box want to rock outward, even a little?  If so, the joint's not flat, and you've got work to do.

Only when the peg box won't move in the joint, no matter where you press on it, is it really fitted well.

Okay, so that's the first point I wanted to make: fitting the joint really well.  The second point is gluing the joint really well.

I use hide glue for all joints on the lutes I make, which is wonderful stuff, but it requires some careful use, depending on the joint it's used to glue.  For joints that involve gluing end grain, especially, it's necessary to size the joint first--otherwise, the glue will tend to wick away, leaving the joint starved.  I think that's what happened to the peg box when I originally glued it back in 2007.  As you saw above, there wasn't much glue residue on the back of the peg box when it broke out, which suggests to me that the glue had wicked away--and the reason was, I hadn't sized the joint.

Actually, I hadn't known to size the joint.  In all the reading I'd done over the years about lute making, I had never really encountered the concept.  The book I was most familiar with, Robert Lundberg's Historical Lute Construction, doesn't mention it at all; that's not surprising, I suppose, since Lundberg didn't actually use hide glue (for the purposes of that book, at least).

I really first learned about the importance of sizing joints carefully from Grant Tomlinson, my first and best teacher in lute making.  All that I'm sharing with you here comes straight from him, so for whatever benefit you derive from my writing, the thanks should go to him.

Back to sizing: make a batch of hide glue as you would normally do, soaking the glue granules first, then heating in jar in a water-bath; then when the glue is hot and liquid, dilute it to about half its normal strength.  Brush this size on all the surfaces of the joint, on the bottom and back of the peg box, and on the bottom and back of the neck rebate.  Allow the size to dry--about 15-20 minutes--then size all surfaces again.  Size about three or four times in total, and leave to dry thoroughly overnight--then the next day, re-fit the joint again, for the final time (the sizing process will have slightly distorted the surfaces of the wood).

When the joint is perfect, you can glue in the peg box, with the assurance that the glue won't wick away from the joint.  With a peg box fitted this well, and sized this well, there should be no more problems with fragile or glue-starved joints.  This peg box joint will not fail, and that's a guarantee.

So that's the story of my peg box fix, and, for those about to fit their own peg boxes, I hope it will be helpful.  This post strikes me as being a bit text-heavy, and that's too bad, but sometimes things just need explaining and there's no way to get around it.  However, there's one last part of the peg box gluing procedure that I haven't talked about, and that's the actual gluing part--the part where glue is applied, and the peg box is clamped in place.  I won't talk about that here, but I tell you what--for those more visually-oriented learners out there, I will include as a bonus a photo of my gluing rig.  You may find information in it that's helpful in your own work.  Enjoy!

 

The Lute Doctor Is In

Today I'd like to tell you about a fairly substantial--and quite successful--lute repair I did last summer, for Michael Miranda, of Alhambra, California.  The patient was a lovely 13 course baroque lute made in 1979 by Nico van der Waals; the case history and diagnosis were a little complicated.

Photo: Michael Miranda

Photo: Michael Miranda

Michael bought the lute in 2001, and though it was still in pretty good shape, it had obviously been well-used over its lifetime.  Then recently, he explained to me, it began to lose sustain and response in the treble range, and seemed as though it was becoming 'played out.'  He took it to a local luthier, who put a new belly on it, which worked fine for a time; but after a while the bridge pulled off, destroying the new belly in the process.  Michael then took it to another local luthier who put the old (original) belly back in, which also worked fine for a while, until the belly started to lift up and separate from the edge rib along the bass side.  Fearing catastrophe, Michael slackened all the strings, and the lute was rendered basically unplayable. 

Needless to say, by this point he was feeling a bit frustrated.  He first contacted Grant Tomlinson to see if he might repair the lute (if indeed it could be repaired, after all these misadventures), but Grant was busy and unable to take on the work, and so he passed it to me.  Grant was convinced that the lute could be fixed, and the best way to do it was to use the old belly--a very stiff, fine grained top, with a beautifully carved rose and an elegant bridge--but install a new set of bars.   Much else would need to be done to refurbish and stabilize the belly, as I would find out when I removed it from the body and had a closer look.

Photo: Michael Miranda

The first thing that came clear was that the reason why the the joint between the belly and body failed, was that the edge of the belly was just too chewed up to make good contact with the edge rib.  The belly had been removed many times during the life of the lute, and each time it was, the luthier's palette knife would chew up the edge just a little bit more.  By the time it got to me, there was barely a surface there left to glue.

So, besides replacing the bars, the edge of the belly would have to be rebuilt as well.  There were also numerous cracks--one below the bridge, and one extending from each of the fingerboard points--which would need to be stabilized and filled.

Photo: Michael Miranda

First things first: remove the old bars.  I cut most of the material away with a sharp knife, planed the remainder very close to the surface of the belly with a low-angle block plane, then removed the last remnants with a very sharp scraper.  Whatever had been used to stick the bars down originally, I was pretty sure it wasn't hide glue--some sort of yellow resin, perhaps carpenter's glue.  Whatever it was, it seemed to have deteriorated the material of the belly beneath the bars, turning the wood chalky.  I had to be very careful in removing this stuff, because although the belly was already quite thin (less than1.5mm in most areas), I would need to expose new wood for the new bars to be glued to, to ensure a solid joint.  I had to strike a fine balance here.

With the old bars gone, I could start the rebuilding process.  All along the edge of the belly I planed and scraped a bevel about an inch wide, and you can see in this photo how deep I've gone--nearly to the underside of the ebony half-binding.  You can also see--where the belly is chipped away, exposing the ebony--how badly damaged the belly was in this spot.

With the perimeter of the belly chamfered, I could now glue onto it new strong, close-grained belly material.  I used off-cuts from bellies of lutes I've recently built, and did the gluing in pieces: one on each side, one across the bottom, and one on the "tongue" of the belly.

And I used just about every 2-inch clamp I had in the shop.

Here's the result, with clamps and cauls removed.  Before I could carry on, I had to carefully plane the new wood down to the correct thickness (level with the old wood beside it), and close to the outline of the belly (that is, close to the ebony edge binding.)

Next up: repair the cracks in the soundboard.  In addition to one below the bridge, there were two long cracks extending from the tips of each of the fingerboard points, down almost as far as the large bar above the rose (so, about 3 to 4 inches long).  These cracks had been there for a long time, and were quite wide--the belly had apparently shrunk considerably over the years.  Because of this, the repair would have to be done in two stages: first stabilize the cracks on the underside of the belly, then fill the cracks themselves from the top side.

I glued small diamond patches of spruce soundboard material over the cracks, at intervals (and avoided placing them where any new bars would eventually go.)  As you can see, these cracks were long, and I tried to follow them right to their ends, and deal with their entire lengths, so that they would not open up again later on.

On the top side, I used a sharp knife to actually widen the cracks a little, to make them a more-or-less uniform width along their entire length, and make them into a more deliberately v-shaped channel.  That way, I could shape a long, v-shaped patch of soundboard material that would fit closely and fill the entire channel without gaps on either side.  I glued the patches into place with hide glue, which is perfect for this kind of repair: since it shrinks as it dries, it has a tendency to actually pull the patch material down into the crack, for an even tighter fit. 

I scraped the patches flush, and as you can see, removed a bit of the soundboard's patina in the process.  The patches themselves are also quite a bit lighter in colour than the old belly material.  I later coloured these areas a little with some very thin varnish, and though they won't fade away completely (at least not for a few years), they won't be that noticeable, especially with a rank of 13 courses of strings above them.  In any case, they will certainly be preferable to the cracks that they replaced.

The final stage of rebuilding the belly was to create and glue on a new set of bars.  The instrument was based on a 13 course lute by J.C. Hoffmann (which, if I hadn't recognized it, was helpfully written on the top block by the maker!), so I consulted some historical belly drawings of lutes by Hoffmann, selected some of my heaviest, stiffest bar material, and shaped a new set of bars and glued them on.

I want to show you a shot of the bars as they're being glued on, in the go-bar deck.  You'll notice that the belly is sitting up on a platform; I wouldn't normally use this for gluing on bars, but I did in this case because this belly already has a bridge glued to it, and the platform has a cutout that the bridge fits down into.

Here's a shot of the completed belly, showing the new bars contoured along the tops and trimmed to length, the diamond patches on the cracks, and the new belly material scarf-joined to the outer edges of the belly.  This soundboard is now very solid, has a beautiful, ringing tap-tone, and is ready to be glued back into the body of the lute.

Which I did.  The fit was good: the outline of the belly matched very well with the body, and most importantly, the gluing surface of the belly matched very snugly against the outside rib.  There would be no more problems with the belly lifting away from the body.

One last bit of work was in order: a new set of fingerboard points.  With those cracks having been repaired, the belly was now slightly wider in that area than it had been before, and the old points no longer fit.  With new points in place, the repair was now complete.

See?  You hardly even notice the filled soundboard cracks, once the lute's strung up.

And there we are--the completed repair.  I thought it turned out rather well.  It seemed to have a good, solid, sweet tone; I hoped it would be an improvement over the sound it had before, though I had no way of knowing, since it had been unplayable when I received it.  I shipped the lute back to Michael in August, and eagerly awaited his assessment.  I got an email a few days later.  Here's what it said:

Hi Travis,

It’s a miracle - You’ve brought my lute back to life!! I’ve restrung it, and have slowly brought it up to pitch. The sound is even better than when I first purchased it over 10 years ago. Many, many thanks for your expertise and attention to detail. I look forward to seeing you next summer and will be in touch soon regarding the Vancouver lute fest. All your beers are on me!

take care,

Michael

I just love it when I hear things like this from people I've made or repaired lutes for--it truly makes my day (and I don't just mean the "all your beers are on me" part, though that's nice too.)  I really get a kick out of making lutes work, and not just my own lutes, but lutes by other makers.  I've worked as the Lute Doctor at the LSA's Vancouver Lute Workshop for the last few years, and I've had occasion to fix a few.  Some repairs are large and some are small, but whether I'm simply adjusting the action to make the lute a bit more comfortable to play, or undertaking larger-scale fixes like this one, the process of doing repairs, and seeing the immediate results they can have for players, is very rewarding.

Some lute makers hate doing repairs, and cringe at the very mention.  Not me; I like doing them (in moderation), and I don't mind who hears it.  If there are repairs to be done, I'll schedule them in between batches of my own lutes that I'm working on, just to give myself a little bit of variety at the bench.  You can learn a lot by doing repairs, and one important thing you can learn is to be fearless.  If a lute has been built, it can be unbuilt; whatever is broken can be fixed.  These are principles that doing lute repairs has taught me, and they're principles that I apply in my own lute making practice, every day in my workshop.

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!