Tone Bars Finished

Sunday, October 30, 2005

I now own a set of the Don MacRostie/Stew-Mac videos, thanks to Yonkle from the Cafe. The video helped me learn a better technique for carving tone bars. Another Cafe member, Abarnhart, gave me a nice piece of spruce to carve new tone bars from, and I was able to finish carving both of them tonight using the technique described in the video. Fitting them to the inside of the top is what was giving me a hard time before. My successful attempt was simple as cutting a pencil to a couple inches long, sanding it almost completely in half, and drawing a line on the side of the tone bar following the inside shape of the top, and sanding the tone bar until the pencil marks disappeared. One big difference was using a somewhat solid sanding block instead of using a loose piece of sandpaper. Even though it seemed like I was keeping the wood 90 degrees with the sandpaper, it's impossible to do freehand, and the wood ends up with a "roll" to it. Repeat drawing the line on the side of the tone bar until it fits the top exacly with no gaps at all. This process shouldn't take more than about a half hour per tone bar.

Next is gluing and clamping the tone bars to the inside of the top, and then carving and tuning them to their final shape. Finishing this tonight was very encouraging, I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel :-)