WHEW !, Yesterday I helped a friend install four new ebony tuner pegs in a strange Arabic instrument called and Ous. pronounced OOZE. Then I worked on making circular back up supports to strengthen the area under the Rosettes of the current build. For this I used fine grained cedar cut into a circle large enough to span the routed out channel that the Rosette sits in.
These broad rings will be glued on the underside of the soundboard spanning the grooved area. I will arrange them so that the grain in the round brace opposes the vertical grain of the sound board.
This is where they will be glued, the grain of the wood going 90 degrees apposite of the grain of the soundboard
This will give you the idea of how much is covered.
Next I began laying out the stock for cutting the various braces. I did not have enough stock for them all so I had to go to the table saw. I ripped up lots of quarter-sawn spruce into pieces just slightly wider than 1/4 inch and then sanded them down to 1/4 inch on the thickness sander. Now the whittling begins.
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Then, late in the afternoon I got a surprise visit from Christian, the principal violist at the Festival of Music playing now in Bellingham. We enjoyed a glass of wine and a fine conversation about musical instruments as this fine musician played around with my big old bass that I built last year. He was amused by it.
