Monday, December 31, 2012

Sealing Pipes and Cutting Cherry Lips


Today I had planned on doing the sealing of all the pipes, the gluing of the fourth side, gluing in the languids and making the lips and stoppers. Too ambitious of a list as it turns out. I'm just a little anxious to get a sound out of one of these pipes, I guess.

I did manage to get all the pipes sealed and started work on the pipe caps/lips woodwork.

I originally thought of using shellac for sealing the pipes, since I've got a whole quart of it, and I mainly got it to seal the inside of the trackerbar (honeycomb). Then I got to thinking that maybe the wood glue wouldn't stick to a shellac surface which would make the attachment of the fourth pipe wall problematic. I certainly didn't want to try to seal the pipes after all four walls were glued on.

So I made a sealer out of 1 parts glue to 2 parts water and sealed the inside surfaces, then glued on the fourth wall.

The one major problem I ran into was when I had brushed a pipe with the sealer mixture then got interrupted for about 20 minutes. When I returned to the pipe, the sealer had dried and warped itself out of square:





After getting over the initial panic, I got it damp again with another coat of sealer then subjected it to severe torturing punishment as I glued the fourth wall on (he looks like he's on his back screaming):




Other than that, the sealing and gluing went on without a hitch.


Taking a break from the repetitive work, I decided I'd get started on prepping my cherry sheet for use as the front lips and caps of the pipes. I wanted the bevels on each of the lips to be uniform in angle, so I figured I'd try to bevel the entire board before I cut it into individual pipe pieces. This meant that the grain would be running across the mouth, but I figured that if the air running across the grain was necessary for the languid, it certainly couldn't hurt with the lips.

Since my bandsaw wouldn't go to such a narrow angle, I built up a jig for the cut:





And here's an anticlimactic clip of the actual cutting:



Here are a couple of views of the cherry board after it's been beveled and sanded, ready for crosscutting into pieces for the individual pipes...




Hopefully I can get all the pipe pieces done tomorrow...

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