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Permalink Reply by BUGGY (C) on November 5, 2012 at 11:03am

You were right about the fretting its all over the place...Metal strips poking up!

This is a lash up using masking tape to hold it together and old parlour tail (reduce the tension on the head)

Cheap tuners resting in place and a bolt as a nut and an old rosewood parlour bridge to spread load as far as possible.. and a piece of copper tubing as the bridge... Snake skin is till tight and would sound great if the fretting was right...(they need to learn the rule of 18ths!!) 

Might refret this if I can find a head?...well I managed to get a tune out of it just!

 

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Permalink Reply by Rand Moore on November 5, 2012 at 12:45pm

You don't need to muddle you brain trying to figure out the rule of 18ths, or any other method of calculating fret positions using math or geometry. There are plenty of fret calculators out there on the Internet which produce great results without all the mental exercise. I like the fret calculators that allow you to print out the fret positions, which you can cut and tape together to form your own fret ruler. I'm talking about wfret.com (wfret.zip) and FindFret2D. Both of these (to my recollection) produce only chromatic fret scales, but since the diatonic scale used on mountain dulcimers and stick dulcimers is a subset, it's just a matter of crossing-out which fret positions you don't want with a red pencil. The Stewart-McDonald (Stewmac) fret position calculator has an option fo selecting instruments (a drop down selection box), and if you choose "Dulcimer", it will produce a printout for diatonic fet layout. If you use the same scale length for both the wfret (or FretFind2D) program and the StewMac calculator, then you can compare the two results and easily figure out which ones are not used on the fret scale printout. There have been some articles on CBN which map these differences, but I'm too lazy to dig it up for you. Good luck on you project, and let us know how it works out.

P.S. Youtube & most other wester video servers are blocked in China, so I couldn't see your earlier posting.

-Rand.

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Permalink Reply by Rand Moore on November 5, 2012 at 1:47pm

Click on the image to view it at a larger size.

-Rand.

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Permalink Reply by BUGGY (C) on November 5, 2012 at 8:28pm

Many thanks for your help, I may try removing the head and see if I can repair it.

I have a more traditional goats skin on order to try until I can find some more snakeskin.

Any idea how they would stretch it, as goat skin you put on wet and then it dries?

Do they use a special oil on snakeskin then to stretch it ?

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