Continued from page one
It worked! The glue joint is closed up nicely and should look fine on the finished instrument.
Next, I trimmed off the edges of the plywood face.
Looking like a lyre, at this point!
The outside edges were tidied up with my big belt sander.
This machine made short work of finishing the edge.
Now, the inside edge of the handhole needs to be smoothed and shaped a bit with a rasp and sandpaper. I sure would have liked a power tool for this, but a good rasp works fairly quickly.
The rasp unfortunately caused some of the edges of the plywood to chip out a bit. This looks really unsightly. I tried to minimize the chipping as much as possible, but you can see that it still looks pretty obvious.
I used a bit of wood putty to fill in the chipped areas and also to fill some of the tiny voids in the center layer of the plywood, where they showed at the edge. It really does camouflage the damage nicely. Whew!
The next step is making the bridge. I used a very simple pattern that is adapted from the few pictures I have seen of authentic lyre bridges. It is just made from a bit of birdseye maple that would otherwise end up as scrap. It isn't truly authentic in design, but I really liked the look of it. With a drill, a saw and my sander, this took maybe 10 minutes to make.
Then the tailpiece. I chose to use a scrap of the same kind of birch as was used for the body. It is like a really simplified violin tailpiece. There will be holes later for tying in the tailgut and strings. At this stage, I have about 7 minutes of work invested in the tailpiece. By the time it is done, I expect it will have almost 15 minutes of work in it.
The tailgut is a cord that holds the tailpiece to the lyre. It will fit over a peg on the bottom of the instrument. This peg is just a piece of 5/16" dowel about an inch and a half long. First a hole is drilled in the bottom of the instrument, then the peg is cut to fit the right length. I left about 3/4" sticking out the bottom. I did not glue in the peg, yet.
Now, I get to spend a lot of time with sandpaper making all the parts nice and smooth. Woopie. I may not really love sanding, but I have to say that I like the look and feel of a smooth instrument. I waited until this point to do the sanding because it is so easy to get the wood dirty in my shop. As you can see in a couple of the earlier pictures, there are some grungy spots on the lyre. I wanted to have all the parts ready for finishing at the same time. It seemed more efficient that way. The sanded instrument looks about the same as it did before, but has a much smoother feel to it. I don't enjoy the sanding as much as other steps, but it is worth taking the time to do it right.
Now, the end peg gets glued in. The reason for waiting is because I wanted a really smooth fine finish around the peg, too. With it sticking up, there is no way to get the area around it sanded to match the rest of the instrument. There. Isn't that nice? The lyre is mostly done, except for a bit of fiddly work.
Now, on to finishing! I could do many things for a finish. I like oil finishes for knife handles, so I chose to do the same for the lyre. I just use Watco Danish Oil. I rubbed in two coats, according to the directions on the can. All the wooden parts were then finished with Watco Finishing Wax. This gives a thin protective coat and gives a little extra depth to the finish.