Kit has arrived.

Friends and allies.

Some days ago the first part of my kit arrived from France, delayed in part due to the harsh conditions of a snowy winter here up north. The Paris Workshop suddenly lacked the keyboard for the spinet, but they sent the rest of it. After some period of mixed emotions about the scope of and the challenges in this project, I am not confident that this will be loads of fun.

The first day was spent just briefly looking at the parts and their 1:1 size drawing of the spinet with extremely helpful notes. Then it was time to consult the manual, which is a tad bigger than the LEGO instructions I remember from when I was a kid, and (perhaps unfortunately) with a lot less images. After reading thoroughly the instructions of the first parts of the construction and their general guidelines, some tool shopping was in order. I now got most of the tools this construction requires, a complete list of tools I used will be posted later (don't worry, they're not too many).

Then the first day. I spent some time (~2hrs, I try to keep track of the time spent for future builders to have an idea of how much time they might spend) unpacking the box carefully, and checking that all the pieces in their packing list was actually in the box. This took quite some time, since I didn't even know what wrestplank was (it is the solid piece of wood right in front of the keyboard that holds the tuning pins).

P came by and handed over an inaugurating beer and looked excited, though due to circumstances, his lute project has perhaps been delayed some. We matched parts with the 1:1 drawing and put some of them roughly together (without gluing anything of course), just to get an idea of how it will look in the end. Posted are a picture of their drawing and our dry-run spinet lookalike, click them for larger pictures.

Today was the second day. I had now read more carefully the instructions for putting together the case, which consists of several sides (bentside, fronts, spine (the long one in the back), tail (between the bentside and the spine), frames (for internal structure), liners (to hold the soundboard to be installed later, glued to the sides) and the wrestplank. After putting things together in a dry run (i.e. without glue, as the instructions recommend you do at least once), I ended up doing the initial sanding of the sides, gluing some small parts on the pieces that form parts of the frame and keywell (into which the keys go), as well as preparing the wrestplank for drilling holes for the tuning pins. I was hoping to get that done, but without battery on the drill that didn't happen. So tomorrow it is. The instructions recommend that you cut out parts of the 1:1 drawing they hand you, but I thought that would do wonders on my wall later, so I used copy-paper to mark where the tuning pin holes will be.

So much for today. Tomorrow is another one.