It will also have a carved pegbox with an animal head, only this time the animal will be a lion, based roughly on Celtic designs.

The rosette will be carved into a knotwork pattern, based on a knotwork from the Book of Kells. The idea was to have it echo somewhat the diamond and circle pattern that appears on the back of the instrument.

So we begin. This is a nice, resonent piece of 2" thick eastern maple that is already somewhat aged, having been in the house now for at least a year (this was the backup piece for Citole #3 originally). One of the most common questions I get whenever people look at Citole one is "How long did it take you to make that?" While I randomly guess at least several hundred hours, I actually couldn't give people a known figure. So one of the things I decided to do with this one is to actually calculate the amount of time it takes to do each step. Here we've drawn the pattern carefully onto the wood. The centerline has been marked (and will continually be re-marked to maintain it clearly as we go along), and the area to be drilled out eventually gridded. Total time under an hour.

The first wave of cutting. This is done with the larger manual saw - not done extremely exactly, more just a gross removal of wood. The maple is again rather harder than the cherrywood, and is a little difficult to saw through. Total sawing time was about five hours, spread out over a couple of nights (as my arm fatigues after about an hour).

The body cavity clearing is started by drilling a bunch of holes with a 1/2" bit. Like before (see above) I used the "stopper" method to keep from drilling too deeply, but otherwise all this is done with a hand drill (power, but not a drill press). The drilling itself took about an hour or so, but had to be done over an evening's time, as the drill starts to overheat if used too continuously. The maple is, as already noted, fairly hard and the drill really has to work to get through it. I also learned (from working on the other citoles) that it's easier to carve out the cavity before cutting the outer walls close - it makes the wood stronger for the harder chisel hacking that has to be done to clear the cavity, and gives a little possible leeway should a mistake occur.

Starting the "hacking out" of the body cavity, using the scoop chisel and a mallet. The maple clears slower than the cherry, but still cut pretty quickly.

Finished the first pass of clearing out the body cavity, all done with the simple scoop chisel and mallet. This took a total of about four hours. Now need to take the smaller chisels (and potentially the dremel) to smooth out the walls and basically level the floor. Neither will be finally finished until the outside carving is done, as the thicknessing will be done from the inside.

Was finally (after much searching, as many of my regular sources have dried up) able to secure a piece of ivory for the rosette. This nice BIG piece came from Cue Components, which sells billard cue making supplies. Seemed an odd source, but they were very helpful, rather inexpensive, and very quick. Took about 1/2 hour to transfer the pattern from paper to the ivory and clean it up for drilling. Obviously I have enough on this one piece to probably make another rosette!

The drilling has been done on the rosette - this took about two hours with the dremel drill-press. Lots of little holes (no, I haven't counted). The two holes off to the side were tests to prep lining up the depth and targeting of the little press so I didn't damage the primary pattern.

About another two or three hours of chipping away (carefully) at the larger spaces with the mini-chisels has basically opened up the large spaces. The smaller spaces will then be done with the micro-chisels, and then all of them cleaned up with the mini-files. The ivory color is actually pretty white - it tends to look creamy or almost brown because of the slightly odd lightening of the photos, and to help make it more clear.

And another two hours or so have working with the micro-chisels opens up the remaining space. From here on out the rest of the work is done with the mini-files to shape the holes. After that the chisels come back to do the "knotworking" pattern.

About 10 more hours and we have the filing done, so the sillouette is complete. It has also been cut out (using a jeweler's saw) from the slab and the edges evened out with the files. All that remains here now is the over-under patterning and the ebony edging.

Back on the body block, the outer edge shape has been brought closely into line. This was done with two techniques - the first is to use a small saw to cut a series of notches and then to chip out the spaces between the notches (fairly quick, but risks cracking the wood). The closer work is done with simple small chisels - see below.

Cutting out the neck - start by lining it out, and then cutting a notch (two vertical cuts, with the inner space chipped out), and then using that slot to fit in the coping saw to undercut the rest.

Here you can see the technique of slowly chiseling down the surface of the sides to bring them to just the point I want. The chisels are still faster than filing it down, and throw a lot less dust in the air (since I mostly work on my living room floor, this is a fairly major consideration). You can also see here that the neck has been cut down by this point.

The body has now been fully roughed out on the outside. That took about eight hours of work. Next will be the cleanup of that, so I can do the decorative carving on the outer side of the body. Once that is down, the walls and floor will be thinned down from the inside. You can also see the sketch of the scrollhead on the block.

The sides, with a combination of chisels, files and the scrapers have been smoothed out, ready to have the drawings of the patterning done on them. This again took about 2-3 hours per side.

The tail trefoil is carved out into its more or less final form. Not finished - still need to final filing and sanding, but the shape is done.

Starting the shaping of the scrollbox. This sequence shows the rough steps I use to work it down (similar to what I did on the sides). Use a saw to slot the section, then a chisel to chisel out the sections between the slots, and then saw down the sides. The area for the lion head has been left large until I do the sculpture to see its exact dimensions.

The basic structural carving being done, I now start the surface detailing. Here the pattern has been drawn onto the back of the instrument.

About 3/4ths of the way done the back pattern. The initial line is "traced" with a sharp knife, creating an incision about 1/8 inch deep. Then a "V" channel is chipped out using the small chisels to either side of the line, and cleaned up with a V-chisel and the files. I tried on some scrap using the V-chisel directly on the line, but the changing direction of the grain, coupled especially with the sharp curves of the spiral design, made that very awkward, and I ended up with more mistakes than I could readily clean up. So went with this technique instead. After the full pattern is complete, there will be a double line done ringing the edge of the whole back, which will be then further edged with the ebony edge-binding.

The finished back carvings, though before the back has had a final scrapping/sanding. The sides have also been finished being prepped for having the designs drawn onto them, though still have to clean up the neck (which will be done once I've worked out the peghead design).

This is mostly an amusement image. I sometimes get comments about how people would like to do this kind of project, but don't have a good workshop like I supposedly have. Well, the simple truth is I do most of my work on my living room floor, usually while watching (or rather mostly listening to) television. It's a nice time to catch up on all those commentary tracks of the various DVD's I have. The 'table' is actually my wife's Rebok Step, which I plop down in front of and work away. My usual "live studio audience" as my wife puts it, consists of our pet rabbits, the male Apricot of which you can see in the background here (happily shreading the newspaper in his cage). Peebs (our female, on the other side of the room behind the camera from this angle) also likes to help by chewing on my projects, or most often chewing on the tools. Apparently there is nothing more fascinating to a rabbit than a fast moving hand saw cutting maple wood...

The side carvings will be a simple matrix of alternating diagonals, lined top and bottom with the ebony edge binding. Here is the design drawn out before worked onto the sides of the instrument. This pattern will run from the tailpiece to the tip of the wing on each side.

Slight reworking of the lionhead, based on a 14th century bronze aquamarile sculpture from the Cloisters in NYC. The person who this citole is for preferred a closed mouth lion to an open mouthed one. Not wildly different from the first idea, but probably in the end easier to carve, as I won't have to do the interior of the mouth.

The clay model of the lionhead, done to actual scale. As with the greyhound head, I find it easier to carve from a 3-D model rather than from 2-D sketches, so I make a scratch version of the carving in clay. Obviously the detail level is rough and the mane here is merely "suggested" rather than the actual mane, which will be a bit fuller (I just didn't feel like wasting time building up the full mane - was more concerned with the form of the head). The corners of the mouth will be cut more deeply in the wood, and at this point the intention is to inlay the eyes with ivory whites and ebony pupils.

Working on the neck and pegbox. This is the neck and pegbox now chiseled down into the appropriate block size. Next is rounding out the neck and drilling the peg holes.

The neck is then rounded and given a distal taper (narrows both side to side and top to bottom as it approaches the pegbox). The point where the neck joins the body is also smoothed out and made more crisp.

Next I turn to the pegbox. The basic guidelines are penciled in where the peg holes will be drilled, where the box will be hollowed, and the centerlines for the head. The double line at the base of the pegbox is where the nut will be going.

Starting off with the head, I penciled the block design for reference from the slightly smaller sculptural model.

Carving the headpiece. The right hand side shows where it will remain until I do the inlay for the eyes. Some final texturing and the mane will be detailed when I do the sanding and finishing pass after the pegbox has been completed. Next drilling the holes and carving out the box.

Marking where the peg holes will be. The spacing is taken from a traditional violin pegbox. Always makes me nervous, as I don't have a drill press, so I'm drilling straight by eyeballing it, which doesn't leave a lot of room for error.

But all turns out fine. Here is the finished pegbox, awaiting final sanding and surfacing. The hollowing channel has been carved out, and the sides thinned and straightened.

With the pegbox done, it's back to the main body cavity to thin out the walls in preparation for the fitting to the soundboard. Here you can see the chisel-work chopping happily away at the side.

Before finally thinning the walls down from the inside, I needed to do the outer decorative carving to verify how deep it would go. The design continues with the parallel line patterning done on the back. First the pattern is drawn on the side, the lines of the drawing are then cut into the wall. The lines are they chisel/chipped in so form a cross-section V cut. And the edging is finally cut. Then I ran a triangular small file through all the groves to smooth out as many irregularities as I could. This process is repeated on the other side. The design follows the curve of the body (so the grain is constantly changing direction, making the chiseling a little difficult). They do not "meet" in the back, as the tail trefoil interrupts the pattern. They are skewed a little higher than vertical center, as the soundboard will add a little thickness at the top.

The side carving done, the cavity walls can now be properly thinned down. The gross wood removal is done with the chisels, with the final pass (especially in the wings) using the dremel. The walls are thinned down to about 3/16th inch thickness (to allow for the cutting in of the sidewalls with the design). The floor has a little smoothing out yet to do, but that will done shortly.

Other bits coming together. The top image is the soundboard piece of cedar. It will end up a bit redder when any finish is applied. The lower piece is the bit of black (lots of glare in photo) ebony that will be the tailpiece, fingerboard, bridge, and nut.

The rough cuts of the fingerboard and tailpiece.

The fingerboard has to be thinned down. The very hard ebony wood is chiseled down (as the brightened photo here shows) and then planed and filed smooth again to about 3/16th inch thickness.

The fingerboard is then centerlined, and cut to more exact shape and length to fit the precise space of the neck of the instrument. (as you can see, this was done before the thinning of the walls)

I decided to use contrasting ivory for the frets and nut. This image shows the frets having been rough cut (from the piece in the upper right corner) and the chunk of ivory (old piano key rough) that will be used for the nut.

The vibrating string length will be 13.5 inches (34.3cm). Using the (now standard) six frets and the fret calculator (see above), this generates frets at 1.93cm, 3.74cm, 5.46cm, 7.08cm, 8.60cm and 10.05cm from the nut edge respectively. Next up will be to cut the grooves using the fret saw at those point, and then add in the frets.

The distances from the nut are carefully marked on the fingerboard, and starting slots cut into the piece with a fret saw (seen partially on the right). The slots are then widened into a deep V shape with files to admit the square cross-section frets (set into the fingerboard at a 45 degree angle, so that the cross section would like like a diamond).

The frets are then evened out using the files, and then set and glued into the slots. Overlapping end material is sawn off (using the fret saw), and thus we have the basic fretboard.

This is then fit and finally shaped to the actual neck of the instrument, and is ready to be glued into place.

Adding the edging ring around the rosette. A strip of ebony is soaked and steam bent into a circle just a hair smaller than the outer edge of the ivory rosette, and allowed to dry and set in that shape (see the mess on top). The ring is then glued together, the overlap scraped down to a skive joint, and the inner edge filed to just admit the ivory rosette, as shown here.

Working on the soundboard, the soundboard is rough cut to shape, and then thinned down to appropriate thickness using a planing tool (I've found that the scraper plane works better on the thin soundboard than the finger plane I have). The piece is then scraped smooth with the scaper, and the long sanding block is run over it to make sure that it is flat and even along the edges where it meets the body.

The rough plate is then trimmed to almost exact size and lined up on the body (it has to be matched against the fingerboard to closely seal the top. Here you can see the slotted fingerboard (sans frets). All of the pictures of this type of citole place the soundhole at more or less the thinnest part of the body, so that is where I centered the hole. The actual circle is traced around the finished edged rosette.

The soundhole is then cut out (using a minature hand saber saw) and filed to match the shape of the rosette as exactly as possible (mostly by fitting it against the hole, seeing where there is overlap, filing out the overlap, refitting it, etc.). When the hole is finally as close as I can get it, the rosette is glued into place.

The soundboard brace is then set. This is fit under the soundboard between the soundhole and the bridge. Generally I've found that the body is small enough that it really only needs the single brace at the widest part of the lower bout just to avoid sag in the soundboard from the pressure of the bridge. The brace is cut from a piece of spruce, and is shaped to a tapered T intersection. It is then test fitted (to make sure it doesn't bump the inner walls of the body), and then glued into place.

Back to the main body. Now that the basics of the body are done, the edging of the lower side should be done before the top is assembled, as I will have to have the instrument upsidedown for most of that process, and didn't want to damage the rosette or fingerboard in the process. The edge binding is done in black ebony strips about 1/4 inch wide and 1/8 thick. First step is to cut a channel around the bottom to accept the edgeing. This is done with a routing attachment on the dremel (see above).

Next the strips are bent into shape using a bending iron (seen here more or less center). The wood is wet down and slowly pressured under heat to accept the new shape. Unfortunately this edging is quite thick. The curves aren't really hard (like in the citoles one and three, both of which had sharp curves), but the thicker wood was harder to bend and required a bit of practice to get to work. The fret saw is also visible here as I trimmed excess length from the strips to get them to fit together more exactly.

In the "it's never as easy as it looks" concept - these are the failed attempts to bend the wood. Most of the little pieces are the bits that snapped off as I was trying to bend the first curve. The long strips made it past the first curve, but tended to crack or snap in the second curve or in fine tuning of the shape. Some of the longer straight bits were able to be salvaged for the straight lines of the edges. Most however were too short. Ah, practice makes perfect. Or at least workable.

Gluing the bottom edge binding into place. This involves a lot of cloth-tape and "citole bondage" as my wife calls it. The edge binding pieces are actually first fitted carefully all into place, and the edges trimmed and shaped so that they all fit as exactly as possible. (the brush, by the way, is for rapid spreading of the glue into the corners of the edging shelf - my fingers are too thick to fit into the small space).

The binding bits all glued into place. They are taller and thicker than necessary, and need to be trimmed down. This is done with chisels and files.

Bottom binding is now done. The dark "staining" is actually ebony dust that needs to be cleaned off. Otherwise we're good to go for assembly.

Working on the pegbox and figurehead. First the neck (now that the fingerboard has been fitted against it) was a little thick, so it was thinned down and the angle readjusted. Then the pegbox itself was softened and shaped. The wedge-space where the box meets the neck is rounded sort of into the shape like a violin neck, and the sweep of the box is cleaned up.

Doing the final carving on the figurehead. The rough-carved lion's face is smoothed out and rounded where needed. Shown here is working on the mane- the penciled in guidelines for cutting and shaping.

The figurehead carving done, I had decided to do inlay for the eyes. The idea was to have a base ebony piece and inlay the "white" of the eye with a small piece of ivory. Shown here are the little chunks of ivory and the scrap bit they were cut from, the strip of ebony I was using for the bases, the micro-needle files, the little pencil plan, and a tiny pair of needle-pliers to hold things while I was working on them. For scale, the ebony strip is 1/4" across.

The little tiny bits of ivory were shaped with the microfiles, and then very small shallow holes were cut into the ebony strip. The blocks were then cut from the strip, and the micro-files shaped the outside of the ebony into the rough eye-shapes. The outer edge was left larger in this picture than it finally ended up.

The final figurehead with the eyes inlaid, from front side and back views. Came out rather well I think.

Now that all the bottom binding is on and the peghead finished, most of the "rough" handling of the body block is done. I didn't want to add on the rather delicate soundboard until I was done with the twisting and turning and such of the body block necessary to do the bottom binding and the carving of the figurehead, etc. With that all finished, the soundboard and fingerboard are carefully test fit and any issues of that cleaned up, and then both are glued down in succession (soundboard first, as it is easier to read the placement off the light soundboard wood rather than the dark ebony). Once again I used the standard "handweight press" method of gluing.

Once the glue has set, the soundboard is cleaned up around the edges (I'd just changed the gerbil cages with cedar wood, and the filing of the aged cedarwood top filled the whole room with cedar smell) and the fingerboard is likewise cleaned up with the already thinned down neck. The only thing left now on the body block is the top edgebinding.

Not to be too repetitive here, but this is the top bit edge binding channel cut, and then the bent side pieces roughly in set. Since I had such a hard time bending the bottom pieces, which when placed turned out to be twice as thick as they needed to be, I decided to sand these down to about the right thickness BEFORE I bent them, which made the bending process much, much easier this time around. The top has five pieces - the two straight sides at the front, the two long bent sides, and the end saddle piece (a little thicker than the simple edgebinding to hold the stress of the tailgut).

What my wife likes to refer to as "citole bondage." The edgebinding put on - top shows the top edge going on. The nice cross-hatch pattern is the two front straight pieces, and the last image shows the saddle piece being held in place. For the last I used tension similar to the way it will actually be stressed by the tailgut to hold it in place.

The top edge binding is then cut and filed down to be flush with the body, and the saddle shaped and filed as well. That completes the construction of the body block.

However one more part must be done before can delve into final sanding, and that is cleaning up and finishing the pegbox. For that I need the pegs. Here is a roughed out peg (technically after shaving, they start out more straight edged and less tapered) in ebony. Using the triangular shaped heads to continue to match the angular designs covering most of the instrument.

There are two specialized tools used when doing the peg shaping - one is called a peg reamer and other a peg shaver. They both have to match rather exactingly in angle for the pegs to fit well into the holes. The reamer creates a tapered hole, and the shaver carves down the peg shaft to match that taper. Here is shown the peg shaver (and lots of shavings) with a peg.

Fitting the pegs correctly is a kind of back and forth process between fitting and then shaving, until they sit at the desired depth. The holes are cut as wide as tolerable to the pegbox without weakening the walls too much. As each hole is not exactly the same (they tend to get narrower toward the lionhead), and each peg length isn't identicle (the pegs get shorter toward the lionhead as the pegbox gets narrower), each peg is fit specifically to it's individual hole. Here are the pegs (still haven't been finally finished) in place. The overhanging shafts will be trimmed down so that they don't stick as much out of the opposite side when I finish each peg.

The body block is now done, and final sanding smooths out all the scratches and such. There are a couple of small imperfections which are cleaned up with wood putty or little grafts, to maintain the clean lines.

Doing the lacquer finishing on the instrument. Like with my own instrument (the highly carved one up above), I'm using a violin oil varnish from the International Violin Company for the finish (as I liked the way it worked on both the rebec and the other citole, and has held up well on both unlike the linseed oil finish which really needs retouching on the dog-headed citole). The oil varnish dries rather slowly. This has the advantage that it makes it easier to apply (the spirit varnish is drying practically as you are using it), but has the disadvantage that it takes a day or two between each coat for it to dry, making the multiple coats a very slow process. The local weather here (suddenly very cold and damp) has slowed that even more (as it doesn't dry as quickly in the cold damp air, and I have to leave windows open in the room as I don't have any real ventilation equipment and don't particularly feel like having my entire apartment smell like oil paint!). The maple, like with my other instrument, came out a very nice golden color. The Cedar is a little darker and redder, and I think will probably redden to almost a cherry color as soon as it sees sunlight. The ivory rosette now stands out VERY brightly.

While the finishing is going on, working on the small bits so that the strings can go on right as that part is done. Here are the nut and bridge roughed out. The nut is ivory (to match the frets), and the bridge ebony. The bridge also has a tapered T cross-section. I will also probably carve out some of the middle (making two "feet") to lighten it up a bit as it is a little heavy.

The last piece (short of the strings themselves) is the tailpiece, which has been roughed out here. Clearly visible on this picture are the guidelines for drilling the holes. The holes are initially drilled with tiny manual finger drills to place them as exactingly as possible (I don't have a drill press), and then widened first with bigger finger drills, and then with files until the string that needs to go through them can slip through without any snagging. The tailpiece will also get a bit of ivory inlay design.

The tailpiece prepped for the ivory inlay - the channels for the ivory have been cut into the thin piece using the small chisels and are now ready for the application of the little ivory bits.

The little ivory bits! These are about 1/16 of an inch wide and very thin. The LONG pieces here are about 3/4th of an inch. I actually have to use mini-pliers to handle them, as my fingers are too big to hold them and work on them.

The idea was to cut square channels and pressure fit the ivory inlays into them. Unfortunately, during one of the pressure fits, the tailpiece itself snapped in half. While rather annoying, I imagine it's better this happened now than when I was tightening up the strings and it trashed the face of the instrument. Ah well, back to the drawing board...

The little ivory bits! These are about 1/16 of an inch wide and very thin. The LONG pieces here are about 3/4th of an inch. I actually have to use mini-pliers to handle them, as my fingers are too big to hold them and work on them.

The new tailpiece. Presently this is about 1/4 of an inch thick (rather than the 1/8 that the other tailpiece was). I'll probably leave it a little thicker overall, and will add the inlay in first before I thin it down.

Even so, don't want a repeat of the previous disaster. So decided to try a different method - this time cutting V-grooves and inserting the diamond cross-sectioned ivory rods into the grooves, much like miniature versions of the frets. This little test sample (long side is 1/2 inch) worked very well and was quite a bit faster as I did not have to get the width of the ivory as exact (the wedge shape just fills the V-groove as far down as it can - the width of the groove determines the width of the sanded down piece). In any event, I'll proceed to do the inlay on the new tailpiece using that method.

In the meantime, the rest of the fitting are finished. Here you can see examples of the rough carved peg (bottom) and the finished shape. All four pegs are now finished and oiled. They will be drilled and cut to length during the stringing set-up. The bridge and nut likewise are fully shaped, and merely awaiting the string set-up for fine tuning. I decided to redesign the bridge a bit, giving it short feet with a small cutout in the center. All of it is now just waiting on the tailpiece, as the body block is complete - the last coat of varnish is dry and polished.

The tailpiece inlay once again didn't work (the thin pieces kept popping out as soon as the wood was stressed. So I finally deceded to scrap the idea entirely, and carved a THIRD tailpiece, this time just carving the design into it rather than inlaying it. That done, the instrument parts were finished!

The finished instrument. The strings are once again natural gut strings from Daniel Larson at Gamut Strings from where I get all my strings. This shows the top/side/bottom, 3/4 view, and a closeup of how the head finally turned out. Then comes that horrible moment when you finally get to hear the thing once it's strung up and discover whether you made a pretty sculpture or a musical instrument. In this case I was rather surprised. I had expected the cedar soundboard to make a slightly more warm tone than my personal instrument (the highly carved one above). Instead, the instrument is actually slightly brighter, and louder than mine. Now the body cavity is slightly smaller, and the walls and back are considerably thinner (the relief carving on mine is much deeper - this one weighs about half of mine), and I did redesign the bridge, so it's difficult to tell which of those factors is the actual culprit (or combination of all of them). In any event, it actually sounds very nice.

In order to ship the instrument to its new home, it needed a case. In brief searching, I was able to locate a 16" oblong viola hardcase for surprisingly little money from the Sam Ash store near my house. With the addition of a tailbit insert (made from a piece of dense foam sewn into a covering of quilted cotton), it fits quite nicely and snugly. It now is in the hands of its new owner!.

Since of course people ask "So what do these things sound like?" here's a (admittedly hasty) recording of this citole before I packed it up for shipping. The piece is Ce Fut en Mai, a 13th century French piece probably by Moniot d'Arras. Click on the sound title to hear it!

CITOLE NUMBER FIVE/SIX I decided to try to do a pair of instruments, for three reasons. First I wanted to try to copy the Parma Baptistry instrument, because it seems to be the most often copied of them. Second, I wanted to see if I could produce multiple instruments off the same pattern. And thirdly, one of the problems I've encountered with the instrument is the short string-length. The 13-14 inch scale with gut strings makes for a bright sounding higher pitched instrument. Trying to tune it as low as the low notes of a violin, for example, means that the low string is quite thick and a bit thuddy in sound. Strummed heavily with the other strings it works fine, but when plucking out individual notes, it doesn't "ring" as well as the higher pitched strings. The only way to make the string thinner would be to either raise the pitch more, or to lengthen the sounding distance (the bridge to nut length). This runs into the opposite problem on the high end of the instrument. The longer length means the string either has to be extremely thin, or have very little tension, both of which reduces the quality of the sound. Even still, I decided to try a longer sounding length, and the Parma model allows for that rather readily without making a bigger sounding box. The body size is about the same, but the bridge can me moved pretty far back on the body, making for a sounding length potentially as long as 16 inches (like a viola more than a violin). So this is that experiment. These instruments will have the parma body outline, be constructed of cherry wood, and have low bridges with inlaid fingerboards, so that the top surface of the instrument is perfectly flat, much like a renaissance lute.

This is the pattern. Most luthier patterns are the "half-instrument" so that the instrument stays symmetrical down the long axis. I cut this from a 1/8" thick piece of masonite. It shows the approximate positions of the soundhole and bridge, though I will be moving the bridge farther back on the instrument.

The block of wood used was actually the remaining bit of the long block used for the dog-headed citole above. That piece was originally eight feet long, so plenty left over. The pattern was traced on both sides of the wood, so that it could be more accurately cut out. This is the basic instrument block cut out of the wood.

The next bit of cutting. The end of the instrument has been rounded off a bit, and the slotting where I need to chisel out the curve of the neck has been done.

A bit of amusement - I didn't actually notice Peebs sneaking into this picture until I looked at them. One of my rabbits deciding to "help" Daddy "carve" the instrument block (nom nom nom!).

The basic body block shape has been established. The neck has been carved down with the chisels to the basic shape, and the peghead rounded out. The back end of the body has also been more rounded off, and the tailknub softened. With the instrument's outer line more or less established, it's time to hollow out the body. A heavy penciled line marks the space to be carved out, and I grid the space in 1/2 inch blocks to drill out the holes to begin the hollowing process.

Using a "stoppered" 1/2 inch drill bit, I fill the space to be hollowed out with as many holes as I can fit. This dramatically speeds up the hollowing process with the chisels. As this is the softer cherry wood rather than the very hard maple, this only took an evening to drill out. Thankfully there were no blow-throughs. The body cavity of this instrument looks to be the largest of any of them to date.

Next I take the straight and scoop chisels and roughly hack out the hollowed space. The sidewalls can be cut fairly smoothly with the chisels, but the front and back ends of the body cavity where the chisel has to cut cross-grain are best done with the dremel. I've dulled too many chisels trying to hammer my way through them. You can also see that the neck has just been rough chiseled at this point, and the back curve is still segmented from the sawing.

With the space of the hollowing established, I turned to the neck and peghead. They started off the full thickness of the wood (about two inches), but need to be brought down to about 1/2-3/4 of an inch. The first part was to just saw the whole thing in half, leaving a piece about one inch thick. The peghead is then angled a bit downward, and the neck thinned down. Here you can see the chisel work shaving down the peghead and neck and angling the joint between the body and the neck.

The neck showing the thickness reduction.

The rough neck work finished. Here the neck has been evened out (both sides mirrored accurately), and the sides and joint to body rounded off with the dremel. The peghead has also been thinned and angled. In this picture, the upper "wing" has been cleaned up but the lower one still has some work to do.

Cleaning out the body cavity farther. The floor of the cavity has been leveled out so that it is even across the space (except at the very back where the back wall still needs to be cleaned up). The front wall has been smoothed and cleaned up, and the upper wing here clean up. The lower wing still needs final shaping and the "point" on the inner space cleared out. I also have decided, after closer examination of the original image, that the original instrument didn't have a tail knub, but that the strings appear to either be secured to pins or to a endpeg. Either way, I sliced off the tail knub, and finished rounding off the back of the instrument.

Putting together the soundboard now. This is the design for the rosette. The person who wanted this instrument was trying to get a lion design into it. This presented two problems - historically, most rosettes were geometrically designed, and it is extremely rare to non-existant to see actual figurative designs outside of the deep multi-layered baroque parchment roses. So I compromised, and came up with this Celtic zoomorphic of a pair of intertwined lions. It still is mostly geometric but presents the lions anyway. Obviously it would be unlikely to see a Celtic design on an Italian instrument, but I'll let that one slip this time.

This is the soundboard cut from its sheet. It is western red cedar, and like with the carpathian spruce, there is a large differential in the hardness between the winter and summer growth rings, so it is very strong along the grain, but flexible perpendicular to it. This is after it has been thinned down (using the planes) and sanded smooth to start the rosette.

Carving the rosette into the soundboard. I initially had thought this would be easy, given the inlay saw... until I realized that I couldn't use the saw in the center of the wide board. This rosette isn't inlaid into the soundboard (such as in Citole one or four), but cut from it (such as in two or three). As such the process for making it didn't change much from those instruments. The design was pencilled onto the wood. Lots of little holes were drilled into it using the finger drills, and the large spaces cut out with an x-acto knife. Then the holes were shaped with the micro-files until you get the center picture above. Unlike the others, though, this was not going to be a flat design. So with the micro-chisels and some minor file-work, the over/under of the knotwork was carved into the rosette, and the structural elements of the head were carved into the wood. This was extremely delicate work, and did result in at least one repair... The back of the rosette itself was then coated with a thin layer of glue to strengthen it and keep it from casually breaking while being handled.

Also different here is the way the fingerboard is being done. On the other instruments, the fingerboard is raised above the level of the soundboard, but on this instrument the top plane of the instrument is perfectly flat. The fingerboard and soundboard are on the exact same level, such as in a renaissance lute. To do this, the soundboard will be "inset" into the body block, and then the fingerboard will actually be inlaid into it, as the fingerboard doesn't reach to the actual edges of the neck. This is consistant with the original sculpture, which has raised frets that don't quite reach to the edges of the neck, and a fingerboard flush with the face of the instrument. Continuing with my trend of doing "reverse" colored instruments, the fingerboard here will be made from hard maple. Here is the basic piece cut out. It will be shaped exactly once I've determined the final thickness of the neck.

Finishing off the shaping of the body block. Here the neck has been carved down to its final shape, rounded and filed down. The joint between the body and neck has been cleaned up, as have been the wings. The peghead has been thinned down to about 3/4 of an inch and cleaned up.

Flipping it over, the body cavity has been cleaned up as well. The walls have been thinned down to about 3/16 of an inch (except the front wall, which was left a little thicker to strengthen the joint of the neck - it's about a 1/4 of an inch thick). The floor of the cavity has been lowered and leveled and the whole roughly smoothed. That's all the shaping on the body block, so now it's time to add the other pieces.

First, the soundboard is cut down to fit as closely to the body as possible. Of particular importance here is the line where the body meets the neck, and how far the soundboard extends over that line. That position is marked, and the body block will then have the walls lowered to have the soundboard inset flush to the top.

The fingerboard will be inlaid into the body block neck. Here I make a cardstock paper template to determine the clean dimensions and position the piece that will be the fingerboard.

The fingerboard piece has been cut down to the template size, and thinned down to a little over an eighth of an inch.

The wall of the main sound cavity has been lowered to receive the "inset" soundboard. This is quick cut with the dremel, and then leveled with the block files.

The soundboard fits cleanly and flush at the neck joint.

The soundboard needed a single brace to keep it from bowing under the pressure of the strings. This is cut from very light spruce, and has an inverted "T" in cross-section. It is glued between where the bridge is and the rosette.

Using the dremel router and cleaned up a bit with the mini-chisels, the channel for the fingerboard has been carved out of the neck. The little "divet" on the lower right side is where I set the dremel router a little too deeply, but it won't effect anything.

The fingerboard is then cleaned up and fit snugly into the channel. The level of the surface has to be set very closely, as I have to install the frets before I do the inlay, so it has to be accurate now.

Cutting the fret slots. This is done with a fret-saw (pretty much a small mitre handsaw). The scale-length has been set to 15.5 inches, and the fret distances figured from the fret calculator program noted above. That also makes this the longest scale for these instruments so far (two others were 13.75, one 13.5 and the other 13.25 inches). I'm hoping that the slight string diameter reduction will improve the lower end of the sound.

Cutting the frets. The frets are made out of wood, as with the other ones. Here the remainder scrap from the maple fingerboard is thinned down to about 1/8 inch and then the frets cut as "comb" into it. The combs teeth are then cut off to make the frets.

Even cut down, then still need to be reduced farther to about 1/16 of an inch. Here the leftmost fret has been filed down to proper thickness (square in cross-section). The others have yet to be thinned down. The drawing pencil is there for scale. Basically I'm making square toothpicks.

Once the frets are small enough, the fret slots are filed into a V shape, and the frets set diagonally into them (so that the cross-section looks like a diamond). Once all the frets have been glued in and the surfaces cleaned up from glue seepage, the frets are filed down to just above the surface of the fingerboard, with the first fret (rightmost in this picture) being the highest and the last fret being the shortest. The fingerboard is now ready to be glued into the body block.

The pegs I'll be using are modified Hill style violin pegs made from European boxwood, which is a rich golden color. These have been taper cut but haven't had the string holes drilled yet.

The holes for the pegs have been drilled in the clover head of the body block. They still need to be reamed to fit the pegs. At this point I'm still debating whether they should be thrust up from underneath or thrust down into the head. The original is a little unclear (could probably be interpretted either way) and various examples go either way. I've found that there is a little more stress on the pegs thrust down into the head, but I personally find them easier to tune that way then from behind (though I've been told I'm a little weird that way). Ellis in his version thrust the pegs from behind, while Marshall's come from above. After checking with the person who will end up with this one, I will be thrusting the pegs in from behind.

This pair of images (only one visible now) shows what I mean by "sanding is forever." The left image shows the peg-head after the shaping was finished and the holes had been drilled and reamed for the pegs. While it's basically flat and the edges have been beveled a bit, all that work had been done with chisels and files. It still has deep gouges and scratches and such from the shaping. Since this instrument will be finished using only oil and beeswax, it has to be sanded to practically glass-smooth. That is done in about four passes with increasing grades of sandpaper, starting with about 150 to grind the deep scratches out (which takes actually the longest - the peghead here took about four or five hours for that pass for the peghead alone), progressing to a 220 sandpaper to get the scratches from the 150 sandpaper out! Then I do a pass with 400 grade paper that pretty much glasses the surface of the hardwood, such that it feels perfectly smooth. A final pass with 3400-4800 grade buffers can actually shine the surface so that it is almost reflective on hard angle. The right hand picture shows where it ends up before any finishes have been applied. This gets tedious, but it makes a big difference in the appearance of the final instrument.

Once the major sanding has been completed on the body block (sanded down to the 220 range), I'm ready to attach the fingerboard and soundboard. The fingerboard goes on first, glued into place with many weights.

After that has dried, I go over the fingerboard and level it to the rest of the neck. Unfortunately that now involves filing inbetween the frets, so it takes a couple of hours to do. Once that has been roughly leveled, but before any final sanding, the soundboard is glued on. Once again the trusty handweignts act as my clamps.

Here's the instrument now with the fingerboard and soundboard attached. The soundboard needs to be evened out a bit and the edges flushed with the sides of the body block. Then the whole thing needs to be sanded down again and glassed as best as possible.

Doing up the fittings. First is the nut. As the fingerboard is flush with the neck, there was nothing for the nut to press up against. So I needed to cut out a shallow channel to seat it into, and then rough cut out the nut from the same maple piece as the fingerboard. Here is the rough shaped piece in place.

Next is the small hardwood inlay at the tail, where the strings will come over the edge of the soundboard. Since the soundboard is softwood, a small saddle is placed here to keep the strings from cutting into the wood. Here the saddle is being clamped in place.

The rough shaped bridge, also from the same maple wood.

The saddle has been filed and sanded down flush with the soundboard and body. This instrument doesn't have a tailpiece. Instead, the strings are directly fixed to pins that jut from the end of the body block. The pins are relatively small and made from copper, and stand out about 1/4" from the body. They are held in entirely by pressure.

With the fittings in place, I use some black nylon string I have to do a mock-up stringing to set the action. This is how high the strings sit above the fingerboard, and it involves deepening the notches in the nut and bridge, checking the level, re-doing the notches, etc. until the height is where you want it. The nylon strings is about as thick as the thickest gut string that will be on this instrument.

The finished bridge and nut, with the notches at the proper depth. I've also "footed" the bridge to make it a little lighter, prettier, and fit more cleanly to the soundboard.

NEXT UP- final sanding and oiling/finishing, and stringing her up!

OTHER RECREATIONS Since I put up this page, I've discovered a number of people who use or make citoles, so I have included them here for people that might want to acquire one, but aren't willing to kill themselves to make one. Its also really interesting to see what other people come up with as solutions to the form of the instrument. These aren't in any particular order - mostly just added as I found them. If you know of any makers or reproductions not listed below, please drop me a line and I'll try to include it. I like to be as thorough as possible.

BERNARD ELLIS did a very nice simple recreation of the Parma Baptistry citole, strung in wire on the left. DAVID MARSHALL did a very similar reworking of the Parma instrument (here posed almost like the original) also strung in wire. Unfortunately, both of these wonderful British luthiers have now passed on, and these instruments may only be found on the secondary market.

SAMUEL COULTER of Dancing Stickmen in California also makes a very nice version of the Parma Baptistry instrument, strung in wire with more decorative carving (see the website for more images and information). His are available for around $1,000.

WAIDLER acquired a number of Bernard Ellis's designs, and is producing them at their workshop in Germany. This is their reworking of his Parma Baptistry Citole, available through the Early Music Shop in England. Present listed price is about $850.00 with the present exchange rate.

MORILLO workshop is now making both a Parma style citole (not pictured, but selling for about $1100) and a Cantigas de Santa Maria style "Latin Guitar" style citole pictured here for about $1000, both through the Early Music Shop in England.

JESUS REOLID in Spain does several variations of citole, based very heavily on the Spanish (logically) Cantigas de Santa Maria (see image above). His webpage is in Spanish, and he does not list prices, so I cannot say what his availability or costs are. But the instruments are very pretty.

CHRIS ELMES at Gaita Instruments in Scotland also makes a really nice version of the Cantigas citole. It is strung in gut with four courses, with the two courses double strung in octaves. His sell for around $1,000.

JOSE IGNACIO FERNANDEZ from Cinco Siglos in Spain did another very elaborately carved variation of the Cantiga citole that came out marvelously. The picture above doesn't come close to doing it any justice - check out his website to see the construction process and the gorgeous final instrument, decoratively carved in patterns along the lines of the Warwick gittern.

UGO CASALONGA (can also be found at Arte di a Musica) from Corsica makes several variants of the Spanish citole. They range in price from $1,000-1,300 or so, depending on decorative elements.

HEILIGENBERGMUSIK also makes a nice citole variant, with a parma like body and a long sickle head. The site is in German, but worth a look (he also makes REALLY nice vielles...).

Luthier Lyn Elder created this citole, being played by its present owner and co-builder Deborah White.

KATE BUEHLER of Unprofitable Instruments is has made a wonderful recreation of the Warwick Castle Gittern/citole, block carved out of a giant chunk of maple. Amongst the most beautiful recreations I've seen. Her webpage (click on her name) has more details on her interpretation. This particular instrument is for sale for $3,200 (not unreasonable) including custom case.

JAN KLIMA in the Czech Republic makes some nice cantiga style citoles. The website is in Czech, so it is rather difficult to read, but the price on the instrument is 15,000 Koruny, which comes out to about $600 US.