Rib routing, Head version 1.0 and a tale of two Kundis

Tuesday night, over to my brother's house to trim some rough edges on the Kundi and route a few nice curved edges on the now sanded ribs.  It takes a while to do each one as I need to move the clamps several times for each rib.  The router is a dangerous tool that takes no prisoners, so I take my time and take care.  It is also noisy and dusty so I'm doing this outside, and have to stop at a reasonable hour to avoid annoying the neighbours too much.  The noise control complaints are supposed to come after the instrument is finished.  It occurs to me that running out of the back of the party with my instrument at 2am may be a little difficult to achieve with a 3 metre long Elephant.  I get four ribs done, the last three will have to wait, probably for the weekend.

I'm starting to get a bit nervous about the head.  It's quite important for the head to be right, and I haven't yet got that sorted.

So I try some experiments with cardboard but am not really happy with the results.  I want to achieve something like this.

Paper mockup head.

I try and achieve this using foam board.  Foam board can be shaped, to a certain degree, by heating it until the foam gets soft.  I get some sheets designed for display boards and manage to get a reasonable head using the foam.  It's a pretty good head, and if I don't come up with a better one it will be fine.  A little more research on the web suggest that there may be similar foams that will give a better result.  I'll try and source some over the next few days.

Head version 1.0

Now I can get back to making the instruments.   The Kundi is getting close, it just needs some more sanding, a resonator/skin and some strings.

Traditionally these instruments would have had a skin stretched over the hollowed out body similar to a banjo.  My original Kundi has a recycled metal plate instead of a skin.  Africans are great recyclers, any  piece of scrap metal will be scavenged and re-used.  A sheet metal skin has other advantages over animal hide for this instrument as the strings have to be threaded through the skin.  Traditionally there would be a thin strip of wood under the hide to stop the strings from pulling through.  Sheet metal is strong enough to hold the strings on its own.

In the spirit of recycling I use an olive oil can, which I cut apart with metal shears and then hammer flat.  The edges of the metal are quite sharp, so I bend them over.   Then I measure the positions of the holes in the original instrument, which are very evenly spaced at 22mm.  There are far more holes than strings.  I am not sure whether this was a mistake on the part of the original builder, or to allow for different pitches and tunings.  So I cut more holes than I will need as it is better to do this now than to only cut seven holes and discover that there is a reason for those extra holes later.

There is also a triangular hole in the side of the instrument, I'm not sure if this is a sound hole, or to aid in string replacement.  Replacing strings on this instrument looks difficult even with a small hole, and impossible without.  So I drill a round hole in the side in approximately the same position as on the original instrument.

The strings on the original instrument are made from fishing line.  I decide to go with acoustic guitar strings as I have some spares already.  To save time I thread all the strings through the metal skin before screwing it into place.

Two Kundis

I tune up the strings in a pentatonic scale and try it out.  It sounds good, and surprisingly loud.  At last I have a completed and playable instrument so  I spend the next hour noodling away.  Raewyn says "that sounds good", so I must be onto something.