Made by Hand (18 page)

While conducting my DIY experiments, I’d been telling myself that it was OK to make mistakes, but when the lives of animals, particularly ones you’ve grown fond of, are lost as a result, it’s not OK. And when DIY takes you away from your family, it defeats the purpose, at least as I’ve been defining it. DIY is supposed to be rewarding and enriching and communal, not stressful and isolating.

Having lost two chickens, I considered what to do next. I wondered whether I even deserved to have chickens. Carla said that we had to consider the new environment we lived in and do the kinds of things that worked
with
it instead of fighting against it. The makeshift chicken pen I’d slapped together after the coyote attack was an example of fighting against the environment. The pen was an attempt to keep out the things that were surrounding it. Keeping chickens here would be an endless struggle, fraught with chronic, low-grade anxiety that a predator was digging its way in.

Why not refocus on vegetable gardening, Carla suggested, and growing an orchard of exotic fruits on the hillside? She pointed out that I’d had a great time gardening the year before, and she was right. We didn’t have a large, flat area for a garden in our new house, but we had a big deck that got a lot of sunlight and would be a perfect place to put some self-watering containers.

“We could give the chickens away to someone who has a better place for them,” said Carla. I liked the idea. It wasn’t fair to keep them here. They needed a place where they could scratch and roam freely. I called the people living in our Tarzana house and asked if they’d be interested in keeping our four remaining chickens. They said they would be happy to take them as soon as they got back from vacation a few weeks later. I told them I’d call them at that time so we could make arrangements for me to come over with the chickens and give them a few lessons on how to keep them.

But when the end of June rolled around, I didn’t call the tenants. I just kept tending to the chickens as usual. Carla didn’t mention our plans either. I suspect neither of us really wanted to live without chickens.

In November, we were down to two hens, having lost Rosie and Daisy in August to a predator who grabbed them when they’d escaped into a part of our yard that didn’t have a fence. The two remaining chickens, Jordan and Darla, were always the shyest of the bunch. Maybe it pays for a chicken to be fearful, with so many other animals (including humans) salivating at the sight of them. Darla has taken to spending her days in the nesting box, leaving only for a moment to eat and drink, then scurrying back to her dark cubbyhole. A visitor who keeps chickens told me that Darla is “broody.” Hens that are broody want to sit on a clutch of eggs and do little else. They make a strange growl if you get too close to them. She told me to lock Darla out of the coop. I’ve been keeping her out during the day, but at night I have to put her back in to keep the coyotes away. One Web site suggests keeping a “very active young cockerel” in the pen to cure a hen of broodiness. “He just won’t let them sit there as he’ll constantly be trying to mate them.” I don’t want a rooster, so I might try the other suggestion offered: putting some ice cubes under her while she’s nesting.

Even though keeping chickens can be difficult and at times discouraging and frustrating, there’s something wonderful about having them around. Humans and chickens have been living with each other for ten thousand years, and it’s a bond that’s hard to break. Carla wants me to build a bigger coop, with a nicer-looking pen. I’m glad she wants to keep chickens. Raising these fascinating animals, despite all the hassles involved, is one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. Now that we have chickens in our life, we don’t want to go back to living without them.

6

STRUMMING AND STIRRING

“What’s important about this making stuff is that it’s a balance to what I call ‘digeritis,’ which is having everything virtual and electronic. When you make things by hand, it’s yours; there’s no mystery how it got made. If you get an idea and you make it yourself, there’s something about that that is really good for you.”

 

 

 

 

Twenty-five years ago, a guitar maker from Minneapolis named Bob McNally designed a stringed musical instrument that even a rank amateur could use to make sweet-sounding music. He called it the Strumstick. With its triangular body and three strings, it resembled a small Russian balalaika. Today McNally sells Strum-sticks (generically known as stick dulcimers) on his Web site for $140. The instrument uses drone, or diatonic, tuning, in which the frets are spaced to give only the major notes of the scale. Mountain dulcimers, bagpipes, and sitars use this tuning as well. To make music with a Strumstick, all you have to do is press down on any fret along the neck and strum all three strings. The unfretted strings will accompany the fretted string with pleasing harmony. I’ve owned one for a couple of years, and it’s a hit with visitors who’ve never learned to play a guitar, because making nice sounds with the Strumstick is foolproof.

One day in 2008 as I was strumming, I started wondering if anyone had made his own Strumstick. I looked for videos on You-Tube and found plenty of people who had made their own drone-tuned instruments. Some had used cigar boxes for the body, and the resulting instruments looked and sounded great. I thought this might be a fun way to make my own stick dulcimer, but the frets intimidated me. You needed to saw grooves into the neck and insert the metal frets, all at the same height and in such a way that they wouldn’t pop out. I couldn’t find any good information online about installing frets, so I put the idea aside.

A couple of weeks later, I stumbled across a Web site that demonstrated how to make a ukulele out of a Tupperware container. It wasn’t pretty, but it sounded great. More impressive, at least to me, was how the guy made the frets for it—with flat toothpicks. He simply glued them along the neck at the proper locations with epoxy. Suddenly, the barrier to entry had been lowered enough for me to give instrument making a try. I ordered a set of ukulele tuning pegs ($8) and a set of baritone ukulele strings ($6), and when they arrived a couple of days later, I went to work.

First, I needed some wood for the neck and body. I didn’t have a cigar box handy, but since I planned to make the instrument electric, I could use a solid piece of wood. Sifting through my scrap-lumber collection didn’t turn up anything usable, but when I examined the clubhouse my daughters had built in the backyard, I found a piece of wood attached to it, originally from a kitchen table that had broken a couple of years earlier, that looked like it might do the trick. I pried it loose. (I caught flak for it when Sarina noticed the missing piece of her clubhouse a couple of days later.)

Using my Strumstick as a guide, I measured the length of the strings from the bridge to the nut, adding about six more inches. That way, I could make the neck and the body out of a single piece of wood, eliminating the need for fasteners and glue.

To mark where the frets would go, I just held the Strumstick up against my piece of wood and made marks with a pencil. Then I used a jigsaw to cut the wood to size and sanded it smooth.

All the little problems to be addressed in making the stick dulcimer had me scurrying to different parts of the house, the scrap pile, and even the trash can in search of solutions. It felt great to be so engaged with what I was doing, using my hands and mind together to make a physical object instead of just moving a mouse around and tapping keys to interface with the world of bits (which is how I spent the majority of my waking hours). Getting involved with something tactile that demands concentration, observation, and resourcefulness was exhilarating.

After coming up with a way to attach the tuners to the end of the neck, I glued down wooden matchsticks—I had forgotten to buy toothpicks—on the penciled-in fret marks. In twenty minutes, the epoxy was dry enough to string the instrument and tune it for a test strum. To my surprise, it worked! It was much quieter than the Strumstick, since the strings were nylon instead of steel and it didn’t have a hollow resonating box. But it was a real, working three-stringed instrument. I tried different fret positions, and they all sounded good.

Next, I needed to electrify my instrument by adding a pickup. Most acoustic-guitar players use a microphone with a suction cup that attaches to the guitar’s body, but makers of cigar-box guitars typically either hand-wind their own electric pickups or use a piezoelectric buzzer. This is the component in a smoke alarm that makes that awful high-pitched whine at the first sign of burnt toast, but it can also be used as a microphone. I didn’t happen to have an unused smoke alarm sitting around, but Radio Shack sells the buzzers for a few bucks. I already had one in my junk drawer, and after a lot of experimenting, I ended up cracking open the black plastic housing and removing the paper-thin, nickel-sized metal disc that was the piezoelectric component.

I hollowed out a space in the body for the patch-cord jack and the buzzer. I used a wooden Tinkertoy hub to cover up the hole in the front of the instrument. I had hoped it would look neat, especially since the patch cord would be inserted in the hole in the center of the Tinkertoy hub. But it ended up looking cheap and badly proportioned. Carla said it ruined the simplicity of the design. I agreed. It would have been better to have hollowed out the space for the buzzer from the back of the body and just have a simple hole in the front for the patch cord. Now I had to somehow fix my mistake. I removed the Tinkertoy and rummaged through drawers and boxes looking for something that would work. I spotted a wooden yardstick in a closet. I cut off a small piece, drilled a hole through it for the jack, and glued it to the body of the stick dulcimer (or dronestick, as my friend Steve Lodefink called it when I e-mailed him a photo of the completed instrument), covering the gouged-out hollow. It looked good! The mistake had forced me to come up with something that turned out better than I could have planned.

I finished up the dronestick just in time to take it with me for my appearance on
The Martha Stewart Show
in New York. I was invited to demonstrate some of the cool DIY projects we featured in the magazine (including the temperature-control system for my espresso machine). It was surreal to see Martha pick the instrument up and play it in front of a national audience of TV viewers. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask her to sign it for me.

A few days after building my dronestick, Steve Lodefink (a Leonardo da Vinci of the broad-spectrum hobbyist world, who makes everything from high-flying water rockets to realistic
Planet of the Apes
suits and blogs about his creations at
finkbuilt.com
) sent me a photo of a handsome cigar-box guitar he had built, and I posted it to Boing Boing. A commenter who goes by the handle ZombyWoof wrote:

ZombyWoof had a point. A used guitar with a nice sound doesn’t cost a lot. But you’d miss the joy of playing an instrument you’ve made with your own hands. The folks who hang out at Cigar Box Nation, a Web site for home guitar makers, know all about this feeling of satisfaction. The site has photos and videos of all kinds of ingeniously made stringed instruments, posted by their builders. I was drawn to the music of a guy who goes by the handle One String Willie. He makes crude one-string instruments called diddley bows, which were invented by African slaves in America and were probably based on a similar African musical instrument that required two musicians to play.

After watching his videos, I concluded that One String Willie was a tough, grim character, with his opaque aviator sunglasses and black wool cap pulled down over his head. But I learned that he is also a research chemist for a large pharmaceutical firm in Pennsylvania. His name is David Williams, and after we struck up a correspondence, he sent me one of his terrific CDs,
A Store Bought Guitar Just Won’t Do
, which has songs by both Williams (on a four-string cigar-box guitar of his own making) and his alter ego, Willie (on a one-string diddley bow). The CD cover has side-by-side photos of Williams and Willie, and I was surprised to see how non-menacing he looked in real life. The first song on the CD was titled “A Different Guitar,” and it was about how much he loved his handmade four-string cigar-box guitar.

I figured Williams would have something to say about Zomby-Woof’s disdain for homemade instruments. I called him up. “Do you think store-bought instruments sound better?” I asked.

“
Better
is the wrong word,” he said. “It sounds ‘different,’ not better.” Besides, he said, the joy of creation is reason enough to build your own musical instrument. On his Web site (
www.onestringwillie.com
), Williams mentions Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” Williams explained that Emerson believed “society tends to push people toward conformity, and while conformity is OK in many areas of life, like following traffic laws or wiring your house correctly, it is less welcome in other areas, such as the arts. A homemade instrument allows—
forces
—you to break out of the rut of artistic conformity, as there is no established way of playing, there is no established way the instrument is expected to sound, and there are no books to tell you how to proceed. You need to teach yourself how to make music come out of your homemade instrument, drawing from your experiences with other instruments and from the music that is inside your head. If you view this as a journey and not a destination, it is a liberating and joyful experience.”

Another important reason to make your own instrument, Williams told me, is that doing so breaks you out of the mind-set that musicians (and, really, everybody else) have that buying the latest gear will make you happier. Before he started constructing didley bows and cigar-box guitars, Williams would enter a music store thinking that if he bought a new guitar or accessory, he’d become a better player. “But after building my own instrument for little more than the list price of a CD, I realized that I didn’t need an expensive guitar to express myself or to entertain myself or an audience. Building and playing a homemade instrument helps the guitarist to avoid lusting after the latest and greatest gear and to focus on really learning to play on the instrument they have. This runs contrary to the mainstream music industry, which works to drive the lust to buy things.”