These photos below were what I acheived yesterday so I didn’t completely finish the instrument… but I did get alot done and then attached a piezo to the neck and took it out, to Vit S and played it anyways; and so did Ivan!
…and a slightly different view of the same thing.
Now I’ll go out and get a photo of the thing kinda cleaned up and with the neck brazed on plus strengthening … bit.
The frets will be made from 6mm rod bent around some roundy thing, so they are all the same curve (not like the drawing but outer ends out in space) then I’ll get the measurements from the wee machine at windworld and braze on the top and bottom fret, they’ll be wider than the neck by about 10mm each side at the top (headstock) and maybe 25mm each side at the bottom (body) and brazed in the centre to the neck. Then by vice gripping two lengths, from the outer ends of the frets, of square tubing, 12mm, I will have a template to sit all the other frets to. Then it’s just a matter of getting them at the right length and distance from the one before and brazing them on.
When I did the neck brazing, with strengthening gusset, there was no appreciable bending of the neck, but I’ll find out for sure when I braze the frets on as the whether the neck will bend up as the metal cools and tightens. Even if it does I should be able to apply heat to the bottom of the neck below the frets to balance any stresses that appear.
I’m also thinking, and I’ve yet to have succes with this, of mounting some sympathetic strings within the neck cavity itself and the one thing that’ll make or break this idea is being able to mount machine heads. I’ve got room for the main strings by cutting up some wood to slot into the end of the steel tubing that goes through the wok, hey thats a name for this instrument, gwok – in – speel, gwokinspeel, but the sympathetics may be troublesome as the idea in my head may not pan out. Basically it’s about having a violin style tailpiece and adding a set of tuners to that and the question is whether that’ll actually fit under the break for the main strings. At the top the nylon strings will be tied into knots and simply slid into slots. The other unanswered question is how much stretch the weedcutter nylon needs before it comes up to usable tension… I’d surmise it’s alot more than steel but then again normal nylon strings don’t take too much and weedcutter nylons thicker than those and so may take less than those… who knows?