30th Year Photos/#92

First, you buy some wood….

The answer to the question I’ve heard a thousand times “How do you go about building a hammer dulcimer?”  This is a load of about 800 bd ft of vertical grain, hand-picked genuine mahogany that can’t be ordered from anyone in the world.  I don’t think there is a single company with a single individual that knows how to grade such a thing because I’ve been searching for someone to do that for nearly 30 years!  So, I learned how to do it myself then annoyed a hardwood distributor until he allowed me to do so every time a charge of 20,000 feet of mahogany would come out of his barn-sized kiln.  That, my friends, is how you begin building a hammer dulcimer.