Lee Harps

Shall we get the process underway? Here’s a closeup view of the lower end of the soundbox. I will have to eliminate the screw. Can you imagine how large that screw would be in real life size? My guess is that the screw gave access in the sculpture for installing the wire strings.

For a couple of reasons, I have chosen walnut to be my wood of choice for this instrument. First, I think the dark wood will closely resemble the dark bronze of the original statue. Secondly, walnut is a pretty decent carving wood, and there will be lots of 3-D carving involved with this project. Interestingly, the “walnut” boards I had gleaned (and clearly labeled as such) from my late father’s workshop, when planed from rough lumber to smooth lumber, turned out to be CHERRY. So, with my designated wood pile being NON-WALNUT, it was necessary for me to seek lumber. I found a young man, Ben Hagenbuch, who does chainsaw milling and has a drying kiln way up in the woods near Mt. Holly Springs, PA and was able to procure the necessary walnut lumber from him for this harp. Here is one of the slabs I brought home, this is one of several probably 14″ wide by 7/8″ thick and about 4 feet long.

Having planned to make the thickness of the soundbox material only about 1/4 inch, it was necessary for me to size the material and to resaw it to the necessary thickness on the bandsaw.

Having done that, it was then necessary to cut them to size with beveled edges that would be glued together.

Laid face down, these boards were then taped together with masking tape.

Turned over, the “seams” were then spread with glue.

At that point, the assembly is “folded” into a “U” and clamps are used to hold it in position until the glue dries.

Note the heavy blocks I’ve clamped to each side of the assembly. These are there to assure that the edge pieces are vertical. See how easy that was? There’s really nothing to harp building! (Okay, I must “fess up”. My first gluing of the shell wasn’t a total success, so I had to separate the seams and redo it. This made the soundbox dimensions smaller than I had originally planned, but now it will be closer to the size of the original harp.)

This is a bit gutzy, but I guess one can post both successes AND failures on one’s blog page. Here is a project I’ve been hankering to tackle for a year or more and have finally decided to take the plunge. A good friend, Winnie, who is an avid harper owns an antique French bronze casting called “Sans Famille” (“Without Family”), by a sculptor named Bouret, which stands probably about 18 inches high and is a statue of a young boy carrying over his shoulder on a tooled “leather” strap a most interesting harp.

My dream is to translate the harp on this statue into a playable harp of the same appearance that would be around 5 feet tall, as this one would be in real life. I am not sure I can master the fancy carvings (note the Ram’s head, the fluting, and classic French carvings on the column), but I’m game to try. This project could take some considerable time, but I’m going to go into it on the assumption that I CAN do it, and will try to keep you posted as it happens.

I began the process by trying to come up with proportions that might approximate the original figure were it life-size. This I attempted to accomplish by drawing a grid on a photo of the bronze and guessing how tall the boy was, etc.

Having done that, I proceeded to translate that information to a full-sized work sheet .

I doubt that the original French sculptor ever built a playable harp. Who knows if he even used a real harp as a model for his sculpture? Some of the dimensions will present some real structural challenges and it will be necessary for me to take some liberties, but I hope to keep those liberties to a minimum. First of all, this was surely a wire-strung harp, and mine may result in being a much more modern, carbon-fiber strung instrument. I have designed it to be a 36-string harp rather than the mere 14 strings on the sculpture. The heavy tuners in the neck will be replaced by the current, standard tuning pins. I will even plan to install bridge pins (and, perhaps even tuning levers) which the sculpture has not. I am keenly interested, however, in duplicating the ram’s head, the other carvings and other features as depicted on the sculpture. Whether this harp ever becomes a reality or not, I hope you will enjoy sharing the journey with me. My guess is that this project will be the subject of many, many entries over a considerably long period of time. Stay tuned and enjoy the ride with me!

We are still having quite cool nights here in Pennsylvania, hence the growing progress in the garden has been a bit slow. I’m happy to report that, thus far, it is McGregor – 1, Wabbit -0! Here is what has happened to the cabbage plants I planted around the time of the previous post:

I’m quite pleased with their progress, however I cannot say I am pleased with the lettuce plants I planted at the same time. Here’s one example of where they are:

It seems it takes more than a rabbit fence to keep the house sparrows out of one’s garden, and they seem to LOVE fresh lettuce leaves! They are tearing my lettuce plants to shreads! I do have leaf lettuce coming up, so my hope is that, before they destroy the plants altogether, there will be more variety for them to feast on so that both McGregor AND the sparrows will find their fill. Another favorite of the sparrows, I have found, is PEAS! I had a nice row of sugar snap peas coming up but in a day or two discovered them to be snipped to the ground. To protect the peas (don’t know if 1-inch mesh wire will stop them or not), I formed a protective cover for them:

This morning, before going to church, I stood by the corner of the garage watching the sparrows hop over, around and atop the wire, with no evidence of them actually entering the enclosure. It will take a few days for the peas to snap back.

I do have a couple of additional successes to report. The potatoes are coming up nicely:

The sweet corn is looking really nice (thus far). You will notice the black tubing in all the rows. In anticipation of what may be a very dry summer and in an effort to be environmentally friendly with my watering, I have spent some time installing a “seeper hose” watering system with which the water seeps from the black hose just in the immediate area of the planting row.

This is Silver Queen corn. I also have an early Butter and Sugar variety coming up as well. Along the outside of the new garden fence, I’ve planted some day lilys that I divided earlier and have incorporated the watering system to them as well.

Here you see the clear tubing which carries the water to a circle of seeper hose connected to the main water line with a couple of “T” connectors. The beauty of the watering system is that, once in place, one can water the entire garden with a single hose connection. I will eventually have mulched the entire garden with a layer of straw which will serve both to deter the growth of weeds and will also slow the evaporation of plant-preserving water from the soil.

In other garden-related things, the new white dogwood that we planted by the house last year is already blessing us with lovely blooms at the moment.

The wild peppermint by the house that I’ve been battling with to eliminate for years is apparently still quite alive and well. It smells good but has a habit of sending its tendrils underground and taking over one’s flower beds.

And, on the deck in all its golden glory, is the new pot of Yellow Violas that our daughter gave us on Easter.

As the real planting season approaches, all is well and life is good. Stay out of my garden, Mr. Wabbit!!

I feel a bit of true guilt at having called this blog “Leeharps” and having written so little about harps, but here ’tis, spring, the blossoms are coming out, it’s just not the time to be holed up in my workshop when there are so many fun things to do outdoors!

Having said that, I’m here to tell you I am taking issue with Mother Nature! Those blasted WABBITS have made gardening a nightmare for me! For over 30 years, I have been planting, weeding and harvesting this self-same garden, but last year it was a near disaster. In consultation with our neighbors, we think we understand the problem: About a half-block up the street was May’s Greenhouse, a small, ma ‘n pa greenhouse where I would take the kid’s coaster wagon and get it filled with plants for my garden as needed. Behind the greenhouse was a 5-10 acre field on which was generally planted sweet corn. Several years ago Mr. May retired, others tried to make a go of the greenhouse business, but in the end the property was (you guessed it) sold to a developer and is being turned into townhouses!

The cornfield, as we figure, was habitat to many, many rabbits who lived very comfortably, eating the clover and foilage of that acreage. With all that destroyed by the diggers and bulldozers, what’s a bunny to do?! Hey, there’s a guy in the neighborhood who grows a fantastic garden, why not just move over there to eat?! Since the construction has begun, when one walks from the house to the garage at night, one nearly steps on rabbits who are doing their nocturnal rounds for food! It has never been necessary for me to protect my garden from rabbits in the 35 years I’ve lived here, but after the disastrous results of last year’s garden, I’ve decided a fence is my only option if I have any hopes of successfully raising a garden.

Since Christmas, I’ve been scanning the Internet, visiting fence merchants at the State Farm Show, talking with friends, scratching my head for ideas and, having done all that, came up with a fencing solution of my own design. Everyone tells me my fence is too low and that it will not work, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Here’s the fence I’ve designed to, hopefully, keep out Mr. WABBIT. Is it a viable design? I’ll let you know.

What I’ve done is cut 8-foot pressure-treated 4×4s into 4-foot sections for posts, cut horizontal 3.5 inch dados into the tops of them for the horizontal boards (radial arm saw, dado blade), rounded the top ends with a 3/4-inch router bit. My plan uses 28-inch rabbit wire stretched around this structure, placed into the ground 4 inches, leaving 24 inches of wire extending above the ground. The posts are positioned approximately 10-feet apart.

Here you can see a roll of the rabbit fence waiting to be installed.

The post next to the roll of wire, unlike the others, was a locust 4×4 that I happened to have on my lumber pile that I decided to use. Big mistake! It will last forever, but it was so dry and so hard, I could not get the fence staples to drive into it! I had to bore holes and use screws to fasten the wire to it!

Here is a corner post with the wire installed (note the lettuce plants INSIDE the wire).

The horizontal 1×4 (cut to length) boards were attached using galvanized (coated) 2-inch screws. I attached the wire to the vertical posts with wire staples, but it is difficult to pound staples into boards like this, so I chose instead to use galvanized wire to make loops to fasten the wires to the boards.

It being necessary to take tillers and the like in and out of the garden, entry gates were necessary, so I arbitrarily designed the gates thusly:

I can’t help but wonder if the shape might be a subconscious image that I acquired as a small child from a favorite Peter Rabbit book or the like. I did have some Internet input in the construction of the gate. I read an article by a man who, using West System epoxy, made a garden gate without nails nor braces, using thickened epoxy as the bonding medium. I use West System epoxy in building my harps (see, I just HAD to mention HARPS), decided to try it this way, and have a pair of very rigid gates that I suspect will endure for quite some time. The gate hardware was inexpensively purchased from Lee Valley Tools – one of my favorite tool and hardware sources. The posts were also attached to a semi-buried horizontal board which was epoxied to the posts. The gate closes against this board, again, hopefully, creating a barrier against the pesky WABBITS! (Did I mention that I’m having a problem with rabbits in my garden?….)

This fence has been occupying much more of my time than it deserves over the past couple of weeks, and having completed it today, I felt impelled to put it to the rabbit test. I went to the local Agway and purchased lettuce and cabbage plants which I planted this afternoon.

Here are the cabbages:

And here are the lettuces:

If, perchance, I go out to the garden to check on my new plantings tomorrow morning only to find them having been eaten, you may read dastardly things about me in the local papers! My hope is that the nay-sayers here will be wrong about the effectiveness of my low fence. If it turns out that I was wrong, it will be quite easy to drive metal stakes beside the posts and apply higher wire. (What if the damage will have actually been caused by the squirrels and blackbirds, who ignore fences? I guess then I will have wasted my time…. I’ll keep you posted.)

It’s been very dry here in PA. It was probably 3 weeks ago that I planted some onion sets, hoping to have some early green onions. Because it was so dry, only today did I begin to see some life from them.

My wife serves baked potatoes with sour cream and fresh chives fairly regularly, and the chives are absolutely wonderful at the moment.

The rhubarb is beginning to show signs of life, but, for my money, aside from looking nice, it is a waste of garden space! I think it a shame that local people, supposedly of sound mind, would ruin perfectly wonderful strawberries by adding RHUBARB to them! My wife would do that and I only grow the rhubarb for her. As for me, no thanks! (I used to sometimes take fresh rhubarb to a friend at work who liked it and she would sit at her desk, peel it down and eat it RAW! No thanks!)

Now, here’s the one I’m waiting for! ASPARAGUS! If you’ve never eaten spring asparagus, picked fresh from the garden at mealtime, cooked for a few minutes till tender, slathered with a bit of real butter and a sprinkle of salt, then you haven’t lived! Asparagus from the store or the market can be tasty, but not as good as fresh from the garden.

Having had the camera in hand and with it being such a gorgeous, sunny afternoon, I strolled around the property in search of other things that might be worth being photographed. For example, the apricot tree is in full, white-flowered bloom:

The artemesia (wormwood) plants I had cut back to the ground only a few weeks ago, in spite of the dry weather, have grown by leaps and bounds!

The next door neighbor’s forsythia bush is in full bloom (I removed all my own forsythias many years ago).

And, rising up very high behind the forsythia bush is the tulip tree, regaling the neighborhood with its colorful plumage.

Then, also adjacent to the tulip tree, was an azelea bush, very colorful but whose blooms were almost overshadowed by its colorful neighbors.

As I crossed the deck to bring the camera indoors for processing, I couldn’t help but notice the array of colors in the basket of pansies my wife had placed by the back door. Spring offers such an abundance of newness and beauty. It’s a wonderful world. Now, have we solved the WABBIT problem?!