I’ve finally competed the 3 octave bowed psaltery. It’s nearly three feet long, almost a foot wide, and 3 inches tall. It’s quite a bit larger than my regular 2 1/2 octave psalteries. But, it can play notes a full octave lower than the standard model: down to G2!

You can take a listen in the sound clips page, about halfway down.

The psaltery has 3 embedded steel inserts in the back, and you can quickly attach the mounting plate via 3 thumbscrews. Then, the mounting plate has an additional threaded insert that allows it to be mounted onto a camera tripod. Otherwise, you can just remove the plate and play it without a tripod. It’s a bit of a reach to play the longest strings, but it’s not very heavy considering its size: it came out weighing under 5 pounds!

As I mentioned earlier, I’m in the process of developing a 3-octave psaltery. After crunching the numbers in a spreadsheet, and drawing up the plans in CAD, I was just about ready to go…

Except I’d never gone this low before: that is, I’d never strung a psaltery to be played as low as the instrument that I was proposing. (I’m planning to have the 3-octave model start on G2, a full octave lower than my current model.)

So, I made a test-model. It wasn’t rocket science. I just took a big slab of some Ash (or was it Elm?) that had been collected from my yard, and popped a couple of tuning pins in each side. After adding a basic bridge and a wound string, I was ready to start testing the string lengths, tension, and tone.

The main reason for this sidetrack is that I would imagine it would be a real drag to build, drill, and string an entire 35″ long psaltery, only to have the lowest strings sound bad because I didn’t double check to see if all the stringing “rules” that I’d discovered through trial and error on my smaller psalteries were still valid on a larger scale.

So far, so good.

To the left you can see the beginning of my little experiment. I had a narrow yet thick chunk of Cocobolo left from cutting the sides to Arielle’s psaltery, and I was trying to see if I couldn’t find a use for it somehow.

One thing that struck me was that it had the most beautiful sapwood, yet it was too narrow to make an entire back from it, so I decided to cut the board into four strips and bookmatch each pair of strips, to make a four-piece back. Since the sapwood (the lighter area of the wood), was so dramatic and figured, I decided to highlight that area and maximize its area on the back.

I really like how the whole back turned out once I cut out the shape of the psaltery. You can see this piece, along with a closeup shot of the sapwood area, in the Treasure Trove section of my main website.

About a week ago, the thought occurred to me that I could make my own tuning wrench handles. Since then, I’ve been itching to give it a go.

“But what kind of wood should I use for the handle?” I thought.

Well, I resolved that question by making my first tuning wrench handle out of something entirely different from wood: a Banksia Pod.

You’ll quickly notice from the picture that a Banksia Pod is really weird looking! Actually, I think it is somewhat similar to our regular old pine-cones here in the States, except these things come from Australia. They are mostly solid all the way through, except for the obvious holes throughout its body. Anyhow, you can see one of them mounted on my lathe and ready to be transformed into a handle. (And it made a big, furry, fuzzy, crusty, dusty, crackly mess!)

So, after a time that took longer than I am willing to admit, I came out with this handle. (See picture.) I like how the holes look like all sorts of little mouths, which gives the handle an interesting look, and also some traction for you hand.

Best of all, with this new handle, I was able to make a tuning wrench that was as long as I wanted. (Which was quite a bit longer than any of the other bowed psaltery tuning wrenches out there.) Basically, a longer handle means more leverage, and thus more sensitive and precise tuning adjustments – which is a good thing.

You can see from the picture on the left, that I’ve had a “lengthy” progression of tuning wrenches over the years. The one at the top is of course the newest addition and also the longest. The middle guy is the wrench that I currently include with all my regular bowed psaltery orders. (Still quite long at around 8″ total length.) And the bottom one is my very first tuning wrench model, also know as The Worst Tuning Wrench Ever. (I don’t like it because it is short and ugly, and has a square indent that makes it hard to fit it on the tuning pins.)

I hope to perhaps someday offer custom tuning wrenches with all my bowed psalteries, or at least by special request. I think it would be nice to have a tuning wrench from matching woods from the psaltery, made as long or as short as needed.