What’s to do The kit came with a prepared belly, the rose already carved. Nice! Except that the plank is far too thick and the rose not finished. So the goal here is to reduce the thickness of the belly to “Renaissance hypothetical” and then do some cleaning up of the rose. The hypothetical comes from details in Stephan Lundberg’s book “Historical Lute Construction” and I show it here purely for research purposes:

What’s to do Now we are heading off-piste. The neck that came with the kit is, in my opinion, too narrow for “modern hands” leading to a somewhat cramped string spacing. Plus, when I cut the original fail of a join (I really didn’t know what I was doing back then) it meant the remains of the old neck no longer fitted the neck joint. Oh well! This will also mean I have to make a new peg box but we’ll leave that for a later time.

What’s to do In this installment I’ll detail fixing a previous mistake, introduce the belly scoop and the false-belly. These are all small job but give some idea of the kind of details a project like this entails. I will note that none of these jobs is part of the kit build, though there is a kind of false-belly supplied with the kit, but more on that later. A quick fix With the paper gone and the new strips in place it was time to take a closer look at the neck block, that part of the lute where the neck joins to the body.

What’s to do The first task I’m going to do is to get the shell to a new baseline. Not to be overly critical, but any kit instrument is built to a price and to a schedule, and this means there are going to be some compromises made due to economic considerations. This is especially true when you encounter an instrument whose construction can not be easily automated, like a lute.

What are we doing? I’m going to use this blog as ground-zero in my attempt to build, and in some places rebuild, an old EMS 7c lute kit. That is not it, however it does give a good idea of the kind of lute we are about to attempt to build: a simple working instrument of the mid- to late-16th Century. Background A number of years ago I came into possession of an Early Music Shop seven-course lute kit, a project I have been either unable or unwilling to take on until now.