One of the more amusing passages in Ed Kottick’s The Troubadour Virginal Construction and Maintenance Manual reads: I switched from soap to bees wax to grease up the hitch pins for easier insertion, and I only bent a few of them. I drilled the holes using the tiny #57 drill bit inserted in a Dremel, and inserted the pins with a combination of a hand-held nail punch and a brad-pushing tool supplied with the kit (and shown in this photo): I then marked the right bridge for those positions using a combination square. For the remainder, I carefully measured the Mylar drawing to determine the positions of the right bridge pins relative to the bottom of the case. I had already used my little tool for positioned the highest 12 strings. On Construction Days 17 and 18 (April 18th and 19th) I completed the stringing with some modifications to my method, but it become evident in retrospect that I was not modifying my method sufficiently. When I took a ruler to the Mylar drawing, and measured the locations of the bridge pins relative to the inside bottom of the case, I discovered that the left bridge pins were positioned between 2¾ inches to 15 inches, while the right bridge pins were 2⅛ inches to 14½. I assumed that each wire would be positioned so that it ran parallel to the face of the jack.

Building a Virginal: Stringing Progress IIĪt the conclusion of my last installment of this series of blog entries documenting my construction of a Zuckermann Troubadour Virginal, I realized that my approach to stringing the virginal using a tool I described was flawed.

Code by charles petzold