I was happy with how it came out, and worked out the problems that I wanted to.

CITOLE NUMBER THREE Yes, there is another one. This one has a couple of different features worth exploring. First it's going to have a scroll-like pegbox more like a violin, and will have a figurehead of a dog (specifically a greyhound) on it. Next it's going to have a full-sized fleur on the tail to which the tailpiece will be attached. So a couple of experiments to work out. This one is going to be made from cherrywood, like Citole Number Two, as that is much easier to carve, especially for the more intricate fleur and pegbox.

This is the starting plan. It is a fairly close variant of the Queen Mary Psalter citole above, only with a dog's head rather than a horse's. The fitting will be made from walnut.

The block has been roughed out with handsaws. I'm always amazed how fast the saws go through the cherry vs. the hard maple.

Block has now been cleaned up a bit on the outside. The body has been shaped, and the fleur has been shaped for the full thickness of the body, though it will eventually be shaped narrower. The peg-block has been left large until I work out the exact dimensions of the dog head. I'm doing a model of the head in clay to work from (to have a 3-D model to carve from is much easier than trying to work from 2-D drawings), so once that has been worked out, I'll carve down the peghead to a more reasonable size. You can also see the start of the guide lines for the drilling out of the body.

In the interim, working on the soundboard, since carving out the rosette takes a bit of time. This is the design for the rosette.

The soundboard is the other half of the Carpathian white spruce (a master grade piece, very nice, from LMII that I got for Citole One. The guitar soundboard wood is sold in pairs for joining to make a jumbo-sized guitar, but these little instruments only require 1/2 the width, so one guitar soundboard makes two citoles, or three rebecs, or two oval fiddles, etc. The basic outline has been traced onto the board from the body block, and the rosette has been lined up on it for cutting.

The body block now has had all the holes drilled into the area that will be the cavity. This particular piece of cherry was a bit harder than the one used for Citole 2.

Starting to hack out the body cavity, though its a little hard to tell from this image exactly how much has been removed (about half at this point). This particular block is a little "shaggier" in grain than the previous block, which makes me nervous about the block splitting as I'm working on it. But so far everything has gone well.

This is the sculpted (in clay) model head for the greyhound pegbox, showing side, top and front views. He ends up pretty small to fit into the height of the wood for the block - about 2 1/2 inches from nose to ears - but shouldn't be too difficult to work. This isn't an exact version of the final appearance - mostly just a shape guide. The eyes, nose and mouth will be cut more cleanly in the wood than just scratched onto the surface as they are here for reference.

Having the model for how large the head will end up, I was now able to cut the sickle peg-head into rough shape. Overall body as it stands now. I've finished the rough-out of the body cavity, though now the walls need to be thinned to appropriate thickness (a somewhat careful process, as the shaggy grain of this particular block of cherry is prone is splitting - hmm, I notice I say that alot with this piece).

Side view of the rough out of the sickle peghead, before even I rounded off the neck. Getting into the space under the chin is going to be annoying.

3/4 views of the peghead being carved. The first shows the block just starting to be shaped, the ears cut out, and the chin thinned down. The neck of the instrument (as opposed to the dog) has be rounded off at this point, so you can see the wide corner of the pegbox. The second image shows the final shaping of the head, but before the eyes, nose, and mouth have been cut into the surface. The dog's neck has been thinned considerably, and the nose is quite narrow, though that is a little difficult to make out from this angle. The large ears are folded back along the back of the head. The carving was mostly done with the mini-chisels (brown handle above), whose marks can still be seen under the chin a bit and on the front corner of the pegbox as I was softening the sharp front corner. Next I have to hollow out the channel in the pegbox. I have the impression it most likely will have to be open to the bottom of the box, as threading the strings under the dog's nose may prove too annoying.

The rest of the pegbox has been carved out now. The box has been hollowed (done entirely with chisels) starting from the end of the nut down as far under the dog's nose as was reasonably able to be reached. I wanted to give the pegs as much clearance space as I could. The holes for the pegs were initially drilled with the finger drills, and then widened with a normal hand drill. Finally a peg reamer was used to taper the holes to fit the pegs. The pegs themselves will be added later. The peg diameters are slightly narrower than violin pegs, but not by much. Overall the pegbox region is about the size of violin, but a bit wider across, as the neck of the citole is significantly wider than the violin neck. You can also see the prep for the final carving of the dog features, as I mark out where the nose, eyes, and mouth are going to be.

Side view of the neck and peghead. The neck has now been thinned down to its final thickness of about 1/2 inch at the nut. The fingerboard is about 3/16 inch thick on top of that, which should be far more than enough strength for the low tension gut strings that will be on the instrument.

Starting the carving of the trefoil tailpiece. The block is visible here, cut down to about 1/2 of the thickness of the body. The three "circles" of the tail will be each rounded off more into a ball, with the joint to the body dramatically thinned, and around which the tail-gut will wrap to support the tailpiece.

Starting to round off the "balls" of the tailpiece. This is done entirely with the chisels at first, to rough shape the balls into form, though ultimately will be smoothed down with the files.

The end trefoil has been finally shaped with the small chisels and the medium files. These images are from top and underside behind, to give an idea of the thickness of the endball.

The carving for the rosette. Many little holes are drilled in the opening with the micro finger drills. The center block is cut out with an exacto knife, and then the final shaping of the opening is done with the micro diamond files. In the left image, you can see a couple of the holes untouched, some of the inner circle with the drilled holes, the cardinal four inner ones with the center area cut out, and the outer three cardinals more or less finished. The rosette is about two inches across. The second image shows the inner space fully complete. The rightmost image shows the final rosette. The carpathian spruce has a very large differential in hardness between its grains, so is a little more difficult to work. But it is significantly stronger and lighter than the sitka spruce.

Back to the main body cavity. The floor has been leveled and thinned down to its final thickness. The walls have been thinned down until I could flex them with one hand spanning the waist (the side walls are about 1/8 inch thick plus or minus). The front wall connecting to the neck has been left thicker to avoid the potential problem with citole number two. In citole two, when I thinned down the front wall to the same thickness as the others, I could actually flex the neck a bit. It hasn't yet affected the action on the instrument, but I decided I didn't want to take a chance with this one. Still, the whole block weighs less than a pound at this point. The cherry is definitely much lighter than the maple. A little sanding cleanup is necessary at the edges where you can still see the chisel marks as I cleaned up the floor around the newly thinned walls. I honestly have no idea what the dark flecks are. They randomly appear in the wood as paper-thin bits - they aren't knots. There is one knot in the body, a little off center in the widest portion of the back area. You can just make it out in the picture.

Time now to start the actual assembly. This is the bracing bar that goes underneath the widest portion of the soundboard, just off the location of the bridge. It is made from red cedar, and is shaped like an upside-down T in cross-section. First it must be glued to the underside of the soundboard before the soundboard is attached to the main body.

The start of the fingerboard. It has been cut to shape and thinned down to appropriate thickness. Once I get a clean measurement of the nut to bridge position on the basic body (block and soundboard), I'll add the frets to it.

The tailpiece, cut to shape and thinned down to final thickness. This one is not like the rebec or fiddle tails in that it is perfectly flat, not arched. The holes will be drilled once I have the body together and can space everything cleanly.

Starting the actual assembly now. The first piece on is the brace for the soundboard. Back to using my handweight method to attach this to the soundboard. The attached piece is shown next.

Attaching the soundboard to the body. Again with the trusty handweights, this was lined up very carefully and glued down. The next picture shows the closed body as I'm fitting the fingerboard for trimming.

The fingerboard is next. The frets are made by taking a thin sheet and functionally turning it into a comb by cutting slots in it, and then cutting off the teeth. The teeth then become the square frets. The fret distances are determined by a fret calculator, such as this one at the Manchester Guitar Tech, though there are others. I used a 13 7/8 inch scale here. The slots are cut first with a fret saw, and then a square file is used to broaden the cut into a V shape. The frets are then laid into the slots and glued in place one at a time. Once all the frets are placed and dry, the overhanging edges are trimmed off using a coping saw, and the edges are beveled inward. In the previous instrument I used constrasting wood for the frets, this time I decided to keep it monochrome, as it were, and used the same wood from which the fretboard was made.

Last bit of actual carving done on the dog's head to finish off the features, and clean up the shape. This took several reference pictures of greyhounds to get something akin to correct. And yes, they really do have that line ridge all the way down their skulls.

The carving done, the fingerboard is attached to the body in the typical hand-weight clamping method and let dry. Both the bottom of the fingerboard and the neck of the instrument are given some skuffing so that the glue has a place to hold, and so that it is less likely to slide around as it is drying.

Once the fingerboard is dry, the final sanding and shaping of the body is done. This takes quite a while, and is probably the most tedious portion of the whole instrument making process. I start off with the carbide files, and work down to very fine sandpaper. This is about halfway through the process here. Once in place, the frets are also flattened using a fine grit long flat file to level them, and remove any sharp edges that might cut into the gut strings. The micro files are also used to straighten the edges a bit, and to remove any glue that might have gotten onto the fingerboard proper.

All the sanding done, the finishing is added. In this case, I used a rubbed oil finish. Three coats of linseed oil were applied and rubbed and cleaned between each application. This brings out the rich color of the wood (the cherry turned a very nice golden red color, which probably explains its brittleness - the board already had aged some, I think, before I acquired it). It is hung from its peg holes inbetween coats in a well ventilated area. Linseed oil doesn't run the risk of dust settling into the finish like varnishes or laquers, but is EXTREMELY flamable, and requires very good venting to keep from buring (rags saturated in oil have been known to spontaneously combust as the oil vaporizes off of them) or simply getting way too toxic.

The body is now done. Final reaming for the pegs is done to fit the pegs very precisely. I used unmodified rosewood violin pegs on this one as they matched the color of the fingerboard and other fitting almost exactly. The bridge and nut are lowered and slotted for the strings, and adjusted until the action is satisfactory.

The finished instrument, from top, 3/4 view, bottom and close-up of the dog-head on the pegbox. Overall I'm satisfied with it, and the pegbox was not nearly as annoying to do as I imagined it would be. It presently is with its new owners!

CITOLE NUMBER FOUR This one is a requested design, based more on the Cantiga style, using older celtic geometric patterns as the carved decorations. The basic layout design is below: Showing top and bottom view. This one will have a tail trefoil with loop much like the dog-headed one above. . The idea here is to carve the instrument out of maple (like citole one), but to have a Spanish cedar soundboard. The back geometric design will be carved into the body, and there will also be a carved geometric design down the sides of the instrument, as in citole one. The top will have an edge binding, and the intention at this point is to have an inset ivory rosette, though I am presently having a hard time finding another piece of ivory large enough.