ANY Amateur Luthiers here?
So, hi, my name is Anirban, and I reside in Durham, near the Southpoint Mall area. I'm a student of Indian classical music, and I play a 23-stringed fretless lute called a sarod (pronounced - SA - Rode, as in Sally rode into town in her '69 Mustang).
In a fit of madness, I gutted out my instrument last week, and have undertaken the painfully long and complicated process of making this into a really really good instrument. And I would love some help!!
Here's a link to a picture of a sarod - the musician is a good family friend of mine in Cincinnati who has done a lot of research into engineering of this instrument (a lot of what I write below comes from his knowledge base) -
http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/bms/...d%20player.jpg
So, what do you see in the picture - in this picture, you see a solid piece of Burmese teak that has been carved out and made hollow. The sound chamber, towards the right hand of the player, is covered by a goat skin parchment which is glued onto the body. The instrument top (the left hand) plays notes on a fretless steel fingerplate attached to the wood with either brass or zinc plated screws. The steel, brass, or bronze strings, usually piano wire of different gauges, is attached from the tail to the tip and sits on top of a bone bridge (towards the tail), and a bone nut, towards the tip. Tuning is done using the 8 main pegs (the string of which are the ones that are plucked using a coconut shell pick). There are another 15 sympathetic strings (you see the pegs underneath the chest of the player) as well. These sympathetic strings are not plucked - they vibrate when the main strings are being plucked and add resonance to the instrument. In this sarod, the pegs are custom turned using Cocobolo.
So what do I need help with?
My instrument is made of a wood found commonly in eastern India called Toon, which, to my understanding is Indian Mahogany. After I gutted my instrument, I've been working here and there trying to get the varnish off using that nasty orange stuff from Home Depot.
I have a lot of plans for this instrument to try to make it a really world class (or at least, better than what it is now). Here's a list of things I'd love some help with if anyone was interested. And if no one is interested, then I walk the journey alone, so to speak, and will be just as grateful with the opportunity to do so.
1) Carving out the main sound chamber to an even 3/8" thickness -this is usually done with bowl carving chisels, but a combination of sanding and chiseling would work as well, I suppose. Also, if you notice in the picture above, there a round resonator behind the tip of the instrument where the 6 main pegs are - my resonator is too heavy for my instrument, so I'm going to eliminate it - but in order to do so, I need to plug the big hole behind the tip where it fit into with some mahogany and seal it off.
2) Custom staining and sealing the entire instrument - I was thinking of using a combination of stain, tung oil, and shellac to do this, but I'm really really open to suggestions.
3) If I can get access to a lathe and some help, I'd probably nearly faint if I could custom turn new pegs - all 23 of them, using some lightweight wood (butternut, maybe?).
4) Again, this is something so specialized, I will have a tough time - but if I could get my hands on a conical peg reamer (like a really big needle file), and a peg shaper (like a really big pencil sharpener), then I could custom fit the pegs to the main body, because I can them match the taper of the hole in the body to the taper of the pegs. The big IF is in trying to find the reamer and shaper - if not, I'll have to find a musical instrument repair shop to do this (if I could get #3 above done, then it'd be worth it).
5) I can buy mahogany kerfed strips online, so I'd need to glue a strip on either side of the main sound chamber towards the lip of the bowl where the skin is attached to give it some bracing.
6) I'd need to fabricate a mahogany brace for the inside to reinforce the instrument longitudinally.
7) Lastly, wood wise, I'd need to work with 2 relatively small pieces of mahogany - the first would be to make a seat that would help transition from the steel fingerboard to the skin (and possibly have some inlay work of mother of pearl here), and second, an even smaller piece to match up to the nut itself to use as a slider.
The other items are not wood working related, but I'll mention them anyways.
8) Finding a sheet metal shop to custom make the steel plate, either something high-carbon or maybe even stainless steel. The one I have is cast steel with chrome plating - it's pretty bad.
9) Custom making a new nut and /or bridge - usually these are made of bone, but I will be trying out some different materials - guitar guys are always talking about new nut material using something called Tusq, so I might give it a shot.
10) Lastly, if I can find a local source, I'd like to get my string (I have coils of string) cryogenically treated.
So, that's about it. Whew!
That all being said, I can easily drop $1000+ if I tried to have this done professionally, but I don't have that kind of money to drop on this (especially with a 17 month old and #2 on the way) - so this project will be a great hobby for me. Given the nature of the things I'd like to do, getting advice, access to tools, etc. would be really really helpful on speeding things along.
If anyone is even remotely interested in working on something like this, or even if you're just interested to see how it's going, please don't hesitate to contact me. I love talking about my instrument and it's progression to anyone who's willing to listen.
Take care, and great to be here.
Anirban
anirbanmukherjee73@gmail.com
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09-02-2008, 04:29 PM
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