Lee Harps

Recently, I attended our local harp circle at which a lady to my left was playing one of my lap harps which she had purchased from me several years ago. As she was playing it, I heard “buzzing” with some notes and, upon inspection, discovered that the string tension on the bridge pins had, over time, elongated the bridge pin holes in the neck and the strings were no longer properly aligned with the Truitt sharping levers on the harp. On lifting some of the levers, the strings did not fall into the groove on the sharping lever as is intended.

This is the harp in question:

This is one of my favorite harps, mainly because of the beautiful flowers that were painted on the soundboard by local artist, Pat Craig of Pat Craig Studios.

As most builders can tell you, poplar is not generally considered to be “instrument wood”, but in the course of quite a few years of harp building, I have chosen to experiment with using many woods over the years, frequently once and done. This harp, while beautiful, was built of the softer poplar wood, and because of the wood’s softness, the bridge pins, over time, shifted. If you look closely at the photo, you will see a tiny space to the left (in this photo, above) of each bridge pin:

This photo, I think, demonstrates why this happens:

My thinking in making the repair was that I should enhance the “hardness” of the wood around the bridge pin holes, and to do that, first I had to dismantle the harp:

Next I removed the bridge pins and then, using a medicine dropper, filled the holes with liquid epoxy:

Here are the holes after having received the epoxy.

After drying overnight, I used the drill press to re-drill the holes vertically.

Here you can see the bridge pins reinstalled, the harp reassembled, and you can see how, once again, the pins are vertical like the tuning pegs.

With the harp once again reassembled, it was returned to the owner. When she arrived to pick up her harp, she brought with her little Katy who had just gotten her diploma (complete with morter board photos, I was told) having graduated from obedience school. Here is Katy somewhat tentatively perched on my table saw. Dig the sexy winter coat!!

OR: St. Francis gets his closet back!

Meet St. Francis:

This is the SAINT in his original form. He was originally built in 2000, had a great body, but his voice was feeble and pathetic! In the 5 years since his inception, he is now proudly wearing his THIRD soundboard! He is finally getting a voice but his life will have to be the subject of another entry. One of the things he inherited early on was a rolling, rigid closet with wheels.

His most recent soundboard is 5 inches wider than the original, so the SAINT no longer fit into his “closet”. I was stuck with a harp with no case, and an empty, rather large harp case sitting in my garage taking up space with no harp! Solution: 1) Trash the case OR 2) modify it to fit the newly larger St. Francis. I chose the latter.

On the photo above, you can see that I have drawn the areas on the side of the case that need to be “expanded”. This was not a problem on the back of the case, but presented some challenges for the side with the doors.

First, I secured the doors together using plywood and screws.

Having done that, I cut around the part to be expanded thusly and blocked the flap open to the desired distance:

Pieces of plywood were then cut to fit the area around the flap and glued into place.

Using fiberglass cloth

to cover the joints,

all was then embedded in thickened epoxy (here half done),

here fully embedded in epoxy.

The fiberglass/epoxy coating gives it the strength it needs to withstand being banged into and out of vehicles, etc.

The epoxy was quite rough when it had dried, but epoxy, fortunately, sands very well and this is how one gets the smoother finish one desires (notice my nice new Festool sander….):

After sanding the epoxy, I was left with the doors sealed shut.

Separating the doors with of a Japanese back saw,

the doors were once again open.

It was then necessary to clean up the interior of the newly expanded side compartments.

This is how the SAINT looked in the newly expanded case (in this photo, only the rear expansion had been accomplished.)

The original white coating was done with clear epoxy “colored” with white pigment. Over time, this became a rather putrid yellow, so I decided that I would go with black pigment with this revision.

Here he is standing beside his newly refurbished “closet” (the soundboard decorations are still waiting to be accomplished – a project still on my ‘to do’ list ….):

For the interior of the case, I chose to use red velvet (the fabric store did not have fake fur which I would have preferred, so I opted for velvet instead) applied to 1/2 inch building insulation Styrofoam, and the end result looks like this!

Pretty spiffy quarters for a harp that has, over the years, required so many hours of attention. Sometime I’ll tell you about it.

ADDENDUM: As you may have noticed, I take photos of EVERYTHING! What you see below is there because it is a group of photos that really do not fit anywhere else on my site, and since it relates to the subject above, here they are:

This is the store where I purchased my velvet:

How can you NOT take your camera along when the place offers such gorgeous colors?

Then, there was the velvet rack:

Somehow, I felt sorry that I didn’t need any buttons nor thread….

There you have it: The Pennsylvania Fabric Outlet, Lemoyne, PA

Well, the weather people were correct this time: we did receive snow — actually about 6-7 inches of it at our house and the world is beautifully white once again. Much of January in Pennsylvania boasted very unseasonably high temps and very little wintry weather.
Remember the “deck rail” miniproject a while back? Well, here is how it looked today when we awoke:

The decorative grass was heavily laden with snow

and the blackbirds, hundreds of them, fought over the cracked corn my wife spread on the freshly snow-blown driveway.

The fruit trees looked fresh and beautiful against the rail fence by the garden

and the tomato stalks that look so ugly, having not been removed by me, the gardner, even looked nice adorned with snow.

As we went to church, even Harrisburg looked fresh and clean under the blanket of fresh snow. The spire of Market Square Church pointed northward into the still falling snow

and the snow laying on the brick ledges looked like white ribbons wrapped around a red Christmas package.

Even the railroad bridge and the Susquehanna River looked gorgeous thru the freshly falling snow.

It’s winter in Pennsylvania! Finally (or shall we say, again)!

ADDENDUM TO THE ENTRY BELOW: I was just reminded by my friend, Celia, that I did not address the question of the “scissors effect” making string removal difficult that I had discussed in the earlier entry. I think we had diagnosed the problem correctly, but release of the string tension did not alleviate the problem altogether. We still had to fight with the lower few strings to get them out of the holes, however the upper ones did, in fact, come out more easily with the string tension released. In re-stringing the lower end, we drilled out the holes so as to accommodate the new strings more easily.

Since my earlier post regarding the aluminum Linrud harp (which I affectionately called the “tin harp”), this is what transpired: We sent the string data to Laurie Neilsen of Markwood Strings for computer analysis, we decided to go with 9 wrapped strings at the lower end, the upper few being nylon/nylon unlike the original stringing, and we decided to go with re-drilling the soundboard string holes to accept brass grommets. I have also had the pleasure of email consultation with Andrew Thom of Andrew Thom Harps in Tasmania, Australia! Andrew uses some very creative combinations of materials and designs in the harps he creates. He gave me the “go ahead” to use the brass grommets in the aluminum soundboard.
Today Pam brought the Linrud to my shop along with the new string set and we set about in our attempt to install them. We loosened all the strings and decided to dismantle the harp for better access for redrilling the string holes (okay, what I really wanted to know was how they put the darned thing together!)

Wondering how the pillar was attached to the lower end of the soundboard, we discoverred that, under the nice, silver label

was a HOLE!

Surprise! Surprise! In that hole was a cap screw THAT TURNED WITH GREAT DIFFICULTY! I was concerned that we might twist off the head of the screw as I needed to turn the hex wrench with a pliers!

With the bolt loosened, we discovered that it and the string tension were the only things holding the harp together (not an uncommon design). With the bolt gone, the neck popped right off the soundbox:

The casting that is screwed to the underside of the neck that fits over the top of the soundbox is an item that I’ve often wished I could cast for my own harps. I’ve made a similar item with wood, but would love to be able to create a similar item of metal in my shop!

Examination of the soundboard at the point where the pillar was bolted to it revealed a bit of lower soundboard damage that resulted from the string tension:

I took some detailed photos of the neck and blades,

and in the process noticed something interesting about the bridge pins:

First of all, they are installed so very closely to the tuning pegs and they project from the neck such a very short distance. When installing some of the strings, it was very difficult to prevent the angle between the winding and the bridge pin notch from being too great. Second was the bridge pins themselves.

Unlike the bridge pins of the upper-end strings which were perfectly straight, the bridge pins of the lower end of the neck looked like this:

Notice how they very uniformly tilt to the left in this photo! My first impression was that they must have been installed at an angle for some reason (there was little or no distortion of the holes as sometimes occurs with string tension). A bit further up the neck, there appear to be straight pins mixed with angled ones, which brought both Pam and I to the conclusion that, while the holes were not distorted, the pins must have bent at the point of departure from the hole in the maple! Incidentally, the photos above give a very nice view of the neat sharping blade design. They really work smoothly and distinctly. Probably one of the most sophisticated blade designs I have seen.

Now, a few comments about the molded soundbox/soundboard: It was necessary for me to drill holes for the installation of grommets for the strings, and to my surprise, when I did this, I would first get a few brown shavings followed by silver-colored shavings from each hole. It appears that the soundboard is, in fact, some sort of fiberboard with an aluminum string rib attached to the inside. Here is how the assembly looks from the top:

If you look closely at the photo, there seems to be a line of demarcation between the string rib and the soundboard. It is all painted gold, so it is not possible to see the actual color of the material(s) used.

I had anticipated that it would take an hour or so to restring this small harp and do the preliminary tuning. It actually took FOUR hours to do so, but Pam and I had a good time and, when it was all said and done, we were pretty happy with the end result. The harp is once again ready for playing, this time it has brass grommets, and both Pam and I understand the workings of this harp so much better!

Here is Pam happily holding her newly reconditioned Linrud harp!