My Hobbies


Bookbinding has been an intrest since I visited the bindery at Williamsburg VA in the 7th grade. The book above is my attempt at leather binding. It is also my first leather "tooling". The contents are the collective manuals, data sheets and reduced drawings for the last set of machinery we built for a nuclear utility. Yes, thats over a 4" pile of documentation!


Ancient Greek Kitharae were the instrument of the classical Greek poets. I first became interested in this instrument when one of our children were looking for props for a High School Latin dinner. The smaller kithara above was made at that time from pine 2x4's and luan plywood.

Later I spent over a year researching the construction of musical instruments for a book project. While in libraries all over the country I also researched the Kithara. There is very little known about them and NO extant examples of them or complete examples in sculpture. The one above was designed after studying every available vase painting and the few things written. It was built for a "show and tell" item at an American Musical Instrument Society meeting where I presented it and the book project. It was my luck that this group consisted of museum curators and other authors all looking for project financing too.



Musical Instruments - The Guitar

I found my son Patrick, age 16 making a minature guitar out of balsa wood and I asked,
"Why don't you build the real thing?"

The reply was an obvious, "I don't know how. . "

And I said, "I'll teach you." And I got one of those "Oh SURE" looks. . .

We started on some research into laying out the frets which turned out to be one of those not very well known things and then designing the guitar. It was Partick's original design idea to use two overlapping triangles laid out with a compass for the body. His had a triangular sound hole and a trapese bridge and mine (above) had a round sound hole and fixed bridge.

The guitars were made from local walnut, old ebony supplied by a friend, spruce bought new along with some other materials. The necks were aluminium reinforced and dovetailed into the body with a tapered dovetail. The fixtures for bending and gluing up the bodies were almost as big a project as building the instruments. They were built over a period of two summers between the two kithara above.



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