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This was inspired from a book that I read many years ago. I've changed a couple of details but the instrument works surprisingly well.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and you'll get more info by looking at it than by any detailed description on my account. A few points to note:
You will need to glue down the nut and the bridge. Before you do, you make want to experiment with the height of the bridge. Too high, and you have to press harder on the strings. Too low, and the strings may buzz on the fret in front of the one you are pressing on. The body of the dulcimer should be made from a nice resonant piece of hardwood. I made mine from a single piece. The original book I looked at built the dulcimer in a stick form, but it was essentially a hollow box. It still relied on placing the instrument on a surface like a table to give it resonance and volume. IN the past I've used old tea chests, kitchen table, etc. I have a window sill near my computer desk that booms!
The frets in this version are adjustable - this means you can make your dulcimer out of any length of wood that you can find and slide the frets to the correct position. Google for information on tying lute frets to see how this is done. ( I used double frets and they work fine.) This is why the underside of the fingerboard clears the table. If the frets keep slipping you may need to use a small file and to make a series of grooves along the length of the edge of the fingerboard, to give the frets something to hang onto. See diagram. The 7th fret should be halfway along the fingerboard, this will give us our octave. The 4th fret is a 5th above the open string. (ie: if our open string is tuned to C, fret 4 should give us a G and fret 7 a C' (the C the octave above) Beg or borrow a chromatic tuner to get this right, then once you're satisfied with the fret positions, make a small pencil mark on the fingerboard, in case frets slip, or you need to replace them.
Guitar machine-heads are cheap to buy. The ones I bought were $10NZ for the set. I used both and used double courses, to give me more volume. When setting the fret positions, just string up one string.
I used 0.9mm monofilament (fishing line) for the frets and bass strings, and 0.25mm for the melody and drone strings.
There are plenty of websites on conventional dulcimer design. These are great to give you a grounding in the principles of how the dulcimer works
This site last revised April 2011
