Elevator

One hundred and eight degrees Fahrenheit, and I tied a rope to the wire handle on a five gallon can. I was inside a square wooden grain elevator with a corrugated iron roof several stories above me in Basin City. Up before dawn, I drove through the dark to Bruce, Washington, where my uncle ran the local Full Circle, Inc., agribusiness office. He had the Warden, Bruce and Basin City branches to manage. After five or six summers working in the grain warehouses, I had been given the job of taking care of the Basin City elevator. Each day I’d pick up a courier’s pouch at Bruce and climb into a company truck for the run down to my station.

One of the first things I did in Basin City was to try to control the rats. Every day their droppings and their footprints circled the exterior of the elevator. Their dens were narrow cracks in the sides of the concrete pad the elevator stood on. I shoved wire mesh, broken glass and bits of barbed wire into the cracks every day and when I returned in the morning I’d find the hole empty of all my wicked obstacles, not a trace of blood on the fine dust and sand. Rat footprints thronged across the blowsand. Poison was left untouched. These rodents knew their business.

Willamette Meteorite

The meteor explosion over Russia and the unrelated but equally awe-inspiring near miss of the earth by a huge asteroid remind us of the inevitability of space objects colliding with the earth. Disaster movies are a popular genre: one of the favorite video clips in my fifth grade science classroom is one animating the ancient collision between Earth and the planet Thea (but the throbbing, powerful new-age soundtrack clearly contributes to that popularity).

A journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian published a link to a Google map with data for every known meteor strike on Earth, from 2,300 BCE to the present. He erroneously credits the US Meteorological Society for the data…I’m sure it happens all the time. The link actually takes you to the US Meteoritical Society, where I wasn’t able to locate the same map, but there was a ton of information about meteors.

Ellis Hughes and his son pose on the heavy cart they constructed to move the fifteen and a half ton meteorite three quarters of a mile to their own land.

My favorite meteor has got to be the legendary Willamette Meteorite. At 32,000 pounds and composed mostly of iron, with a little nickel, cobalt and phosphorus, this ten-foot long, six-and-a-half foot wide, and four-and-a-quarter foot deep glob of metal balances a heat-polished oval exterior with deeply eroded chambers. But its girth isn’t the big draw.

An Untrodden Path

The surprise wasn’t quite total. I figured that my wife had some idea that I was building a violin in my shop, but it turns out she thought I was making a small-scale instrument for our daughter. When she held the new instrument in her hands she looked delighted.

First steps in building the electric fiddle. The tiny sketch was my concept thumbnail drawing. I used the x-ray of a Stradivarius to create the design on graph paper. Then I enlarged my design to full size to make the half pattern. Carefully cut out, I used the full size design to make the plywood template. I only cut the holes in one half because I can flip the template over to make the other half.

I decided to see what I could do with a plank of Big Leaf Maple from a tree that blew down a few years ago. It was warped and ugly, but in a short section it cleaned up nicely.

Run through the band saw and table saw, the board shows an attractive pattern. I traced the design onto it, using nails to permanently mark the center line.

I roughed out the cut-outs with a drill press and chisels, but I wasn’t pleased with the results. The shapes were too irregular and the chisel strokes tended to crush the grain

Next time I’ll go straight to the scroll saw, using a spiral blade. On this instrument I was able to clean up most of the bad cuts. The rest serve to testify to my learning curve.

Before trimming the plank I roughed out the electronics chamber, with a drill press followed by the router. I used a plywood cutout to guide the router, but I ended up doing a fair amount of free-handing, too.

I cut to within a couple of millimeters of the pencil lines defining the shape of the fiddle. The rest required sanding and filing.

The fingerboard and neck blanks were pre-shaped, but they still required carving on both the bottom and the top.

I used a hand plane and a custom-made file to smooth the top surface of the fingerboard. Flute maker Casey Burns gave me several luthier tools he made years ago, and I’m finally putting them to use.

I needed files and chisels to adjust the shape of the machine-made neck blank from a luthier supply house. One of the more challenging tasks was cutting the angle of the foot.

Cutting the precise shape of the mortise into the body of the instrument was a task that surpassed my skills. Here I have glued in my first shim. I will trim it to size and continue adjusting the fit meticulously over the next few days. Eventually I’ll do another shim on the other side. Tomorrow I will try to level the cheeks and bottom of the cut to keep the fingerboard true to the center line.

Truth to tell, the neck joint has been the most challenging part of the whole project. After revealing the gift to my wife, a dental lab technician, she spent a couple of hours attempting to level all the surfaces using a lathe with a burr. Unfortunately, her work exceeded the tolerances for the measurements at that joint, so I had to glue in another couple of shims. This time I opted for decorative work, using a scrap of exotic hardwood that will definitely stand out.

I built a jig to hold the neck square, then I tilted the band saw table to cut the angle of the foot. The neck in this picture is reversed from the actual cut.Then I used a fine-toothed saw to trim the sides, followed by carving with chisels.

I dry-fit the neck in the hand-cut mortise countless times as I worked. I still don’t have it quite right, but this morning I used hide glue for the first time, to permanently glue the fingerboard to the neck.

There is still plenty to do to finish the instrument, but I’m now at the stage when I need to consult with the ultimate owner. Together we’re deciding on how to dye the wood and how to finish it. I’m explaining how the bridge will be set and I’m putting on more of the fixtures, like the saddle and the nut. Both of these and the bridge will require a few days of labor to make perfect. Then comes dying and varnishing. In the end, though, I expect success!

Making Music

First steps in building the electric fiddle. The tiny sketch was my concept thumbnail drawing. I used the x-ray of a Stradivarius to create the design on graph paper. Then I enlarged my design to full size to make the half pattern. Carefully cut out, I used the full size design to make the plywood template. I only cut the holes in one half because I can flip the template over to make the other half. On some of the instruments I may leave the holes out entirely.

A few months back my wife expressed an envy for a violin stand so that she didn’t have to unpack her instrument to practice. She thought she’d be more likely to play if the instrument was standing by, ready. It took only a couple of weeks for the stand to topple over, spilling the violin and bow on the floor. The fingerboard popped off. I later found a better-designed stand that grips the neck of the instrument automatically. If she wants another one, I’m ready with an idea.

As a rank amateur when it comes to fine instruments, I refused to try to set the fingerboard back in place. I suggested our old friend Dave Nerad might do a better job. The violin sat for a long time before she finally agreed to let me take it to Dave.

In the meantime I thought Patti deserved something less risky to play around on, and since we’d been talking about electric violins, it suddenly occurred to me that the first major project out of my new wood shop ought to be a gift for her.

A couple of years back I purchased an electronic book about designing and building an electric violin. With Christmas coming up, I decided to see what I could do about building an electric violin, my first attempt at building something from scratch.

The component search began simultaneously with the designing process. I went online with a list of items to buy: nut, fingerboard (being short on time I didn’t envision being able to carve a fingerboard or neck, so I intended to buy those parts), the end pin, tailpiece with its various related parts, the strings and so forth. The most important component would be the bridge, since it would include the pickup that would determine the quality of the sound.

I opted for a good Yamaha design, knowing that I would have a bit of re-wiring to do. The pickup was designed to be used on an acoustic violin rather than a purpose-built electric. I also wanted to figure out whether or not to use an on-board pre-amp to boost the signal from the weak piezo bridge pickup. I found an onboard pre-amp mounted in a jack, which would solve two mysteries at once. But the jack was bigger than I would have hoped, so it changed the design I had already  created, requiring me to abandon the left-hand cutout on the lower bout.

To design the body I first sought face-on images of fine violins. I selected an x-ray image of a Stradivarius to work with. I overlaid graph paper on a printout of the image and cut the fiddle back to its minimum requirements. I knew a violinist needs the sensory block of the body to help place their left hand on the high end of the scale, so that curve had to be maintained. Bridge distance was a constant, and so was body width where I would be mounting the chin rest and end pin.

Best Wishes for a Happy Holiday

The author resists a perplexed Earhart Meyer, acting as the local drugstore Santa Claus in Othello in the late 1950s.

Dear MSN

We’ve experienced a streak of electronic bad luck recently. Unauthorized charges began appearing on my credit card, so I had to cancel it and replace it. I planned to be home to meet the Fedex truck on the day the new card would arrive, but out in my woodshop I didn’t hear the truck arrive. That meant I had to chase on down to the Skagit to get the packet before their office closed. All worked out, at the expense of some extra wear on the tires and needlessly burned gasoline.

But a day or so later I found myself blocked out of the MSN hotmail account we have been using for years. I tried logging on and my password wouldn’t work.

MSN kindly provided a screen that directs you to an online form to complete to regain access. But the questions include a “security question,” the answer to which my hacker had also changed.

Beyond that, MSN wanted me to provide the subject lines of recent emails I’ve sent (I very rarely ever use subject lines) and addresses of recent emails I sent. Uh…like…I don’t really memorize

Points

Found just outside my doorway in the muddy pit where I was laying bricks for a patio, this projectile point sent ripples of excitement to Seattle and back.

I made my most “significant” archaeological find when I was leveling the earth in front of my porch to set some bricks for a walkway. I came across a stone…not that uncommon…but this one was a peculiar shape. It was flat and sharp-edged. Most of the rocks I was unearthing had been rounded by glacial or riverine action, basically the gravel from an old road. For some reason I set this one aside and later I took it to the sink in the bathroom to sluice the mud off of it. I was floored by what I found: a beautiful palm-sized projectile point.

When I was young in the Lower Crab Creek valley of Eastern Washington it was almost a sign of status to have discovered what we called an arrowhead. My older brothers had all found them and it was frustrating that no matter how many hikes I took, no matter how vigilant I was, with my eyes scanning the crust of the the desert soil, I never received what seemed to be that secret blessing from the past. Maybe they’d all been used up. Then came the hot summer day when my father, blanketed in yellow dust, came home for lunch after spending the morning rototilling a new field he was opening up. He reached into the pocket of his overalls and dropped a red arrowhead on the kitchen table.