Below are some pictures of the progress so far.

Idler roller	Partially assembled
Drive roller (unmounted)	Springs/tension piece

All this is via plans from PlansNow.com. So far, I’d highly recommend buying these plans: everything seems to be solid and well-designed.

Anyhow, what it is is a 3D funnel shaped design that is inlaid flush with the soundboard and sinks about halfway into the psaltery’s body. As for the actual technique used, it is very similar to that of turning a segmented bowl, only on a smaller scale, and without a bottom. The woods used were Hard Maple and Purpleheart.

Now, I know it sort of ruins the effect and the mystique if I show how it’s done, but oh well… Here are some shots of the progress of the rosette as it was being made:

Gluing the blank	Resawed into layers
Reglued, mounted, and turned	Inlaid into soundboard

When a card scraper is sharp, and it hits the back just right, it will peel off a nice layer of material. Here, it was peeling off thin layers of the herringbone pattern.

Such a simple, yet versatile too: long live the card scraper!

Today I used a new rotary tool for the notching: a Dremel Stylus. (Model # 1100-01, which is the only model of stylus available from Dremel, as far as I know…)

The verdict: I love it. In the above picture, you can see how small it is, with the bowed psaltery that I’ve just been working on in the background. What you probably can’t see in the picture is the perfect notches on that psaltery that were just cut with the Stylus.

The Dremel Stylus is small, lightweight, and well-balanced. I really like how much control it gives me in doing fine detail work like this. The variable speed is a plus too, though I’ll mostly be using it at full speed anyway.

I now own 5 different rotary tools, both corded and cordless, from Dremel, B & D, and Ryobi. This new one is without a doubt my favorite. About the only thing that I don’t think the stylus would be superior at is in very heavy/rough work, which is when I will bring out a corded tool; but in almost all other regards, I find it excellent.

I think one of the biggest advantages in a tool like this is the lithium ion battery. These new generation batteries run longer, and are much lighter than traditional NiCad or NiMH batteries. They also stay charged longer between uses, and can be charged in the middle of a cycle – IE before the battery is dead, or after only slight use. I really like the fact that this Dremel comes with a charging cradle, and since the battery can be charged at any time, it basically ensures that whenever I pick the tool up, it’s ready to go.

Well, as you can see from the photo on the left, here’s my cheap, somewhat quirky solution. Stash a whole bunch of pencils or other writing utencils in the miter tracks of your power tools. You could put pens, pencils, chalk, crayons, etc. in the standard miter tracks that come on many table saws and bandsaws. They sit below the surface of the table, and don’t interfere with regular cutting operations (unless you’re using a jig that makes use of the track, of course). Plus, they’re always in plain site and easy to find.

This has been another groundbreaking tip from Phantasy Psalteries.

(And no, in case you were wondering from the photo, I’m not a Clevland Browns fan – it’s just a random pencil that I had lying around.)

1. Medium viscosity CA glue.
2. A deck of playing cards.

What I do is drizzle the CA glue somewhat sparingly over the wood surface to be filled, (a little CA glue goes a long way), and then just use a playing card to level and spread the glue throughout the entire surface of the wood. I also use a box fan on my work table to prevent my eyes from watering up from the fumes.

I use shellac to seal the wood first, so less CA glue is wasted and absorbed into the wood fibers. (Multiple applications can sometimes be necessary.) And in this case, with Cocobolo, it was just about a necessity to seal the wood first, because Cocobolo’s colors will leach into the finish (or pore filler) and taint the nearby wood. In this case, the white lines on the purfling would’ve turned orange if I hadn’t (gingerly) sealed the wood before filling the pores.

To the left you can see the wood surface just after I’ve filled the pores. (The actual color is just a bit redder in person.) The surface will obviously be uneven, but once the CA glue is fully dried, I will go back over it with a cabinet scraper, and/or sandpaper and level things off. Once the wood’s pores are glassy smooth and filled to my liking, I like to let the entire psaltery sit overnight before starting to apply the finish. This ensures that all the solvents and chemicals within the CA glue won’t get trapped under the finish.

I love CA glue as a pore filler because, unlike most pore fillers which are colored, CA is completely transparent and lets the natural beauty of the wood show through. Take a look at an example of a finished Cocobolo psaltery, with its pores filled and a gloss finish applied and buffed.

• 60 tuning/hitch pins – 1 pound, 1.4 ounces
• 30 wound strings – roughly 2.5 ounces
• Bridge – between .5 and .9 ounces depending on the wood used
• Saddle – .1 to .3 ounces

So, you can clearly see, just the “extras” alone are responsible for about 1 pound, 5 ounces of weight. So, even an ultralight psaltery will weigh over 2 pounds when finished. I think it would be quite difficult to get below this number on a 30-string psaltery! (Assuming the sides are at least 1 1/2″ tall, and the length is over 23″.)

Being at the low end of the spectrum, it becomes very hard to achieve even a 5% reduction in overall weight. It is, however, very easy to make things heavier, and by much more than a 5% increase!

You can see from the picture that MOP obviously does not come in giant pre-manufactured rolls because it is harvested from the shells of small mollusks – so it’s more like 1″ long strips – and all of the little strips have to be glued together into a continuous strip, along with adding a black and white border of purfling on each side

This long strip will then be cut, mitered, and reglued into the standard 5-sided shape that I use for rosettes, and then inlaid into the soundboard. It is for another “Atlantis” bowed psaltery I am working on. (And yes, you will notice that the strip is being glued together with lowly clothespins, slightly modified.)

Shortly after this picture was taken, I came very close to gluing my fingers together! I still haven’t done that yet, but I expect to soon, as I can be quite careless with the initial gluing. (I use cyanoacrylate ester (CA) glue to adhere the shell strips together, which is basically just a fancy name for super glue.) Thankfully, I also keep a bottle of CA solvent nearby, to undo any bonds that turn out to be *ahem* less than handy…

The psaltery in the picture is a spruce top, with walnut back and sides, and hard maple binding.

You can clearly see the blue masking tape contrasting with the wood. Pulled tight in both directions, the tape does a good job of holding the binding in the slot until the glue dries. Gluing binding can be a tricky endeavor because you need adequate pressure in two directions – both downward and sideways pressure simultaneously.

Low tack masking tape is used to avoid damaging the wood surface when the tape is removed. Also, I intentionally make the binding a bit over-sized and then route/sand it flush with the surface of the psaltery afterward.

Now, reasoning that the bowed psaltery has sort of a “glassy” tone, you’d think that an all-glass psaltery would be a great idea. It perhaps would have a sort of “mystical” sound to it that nothing else could match. (According to the builder, the psaltery linked to above was made from both glass and acrylic.)

Well, as luck would have it, I used to work with both glass and acrylic when I built aquariums as a hobby. And so, I decided to try this out myself, just as an experiment. Actually, I only used a glass top, so I was able to convert an existing wood psaltery into a glass-topped one by simply removing the soundboard and making a few modifications.

I used a wetsaw and cut out the triangular shape, then I made a circular soundhole with a diamond-tipped holesaw. Just for effect, I used a dremel and etched patterns into the underside of the glass. I set the glass into the psaltery (it was simply held in from the pressure of the strings/bridge, rather than glued/siliconed), and prepared to play this “mystical” instrument.

The result?

There was absolutely nothing “mystical” about it at all. As a matter of fact, it sounded virtually identical to a wood-topped psaltery. The only difference that I could really hear was that the tone was muted and soft. And of course, with glass being as dense as it is, the tone was also very shallow, and the instrument was as heavy as a brick.

Now, I’m sure that most percussion-style instruments built with glass may be a whole different animal, but in my opinion, with a bowed psaltery, the overall design and construction of the instrument has a much greater impact on the sound than the actual materials used. It’s just that certain materials – like quartersawn softwoods – seem to work a whole lot better in achieving a deeper tone.
So, I’m posting this in the How-To section, or rather, how NOT to…