Feeling Good & Getting A Lot Done
May 3, 2024
Good Morning, Y'all!
This has been one of those "get lots done and feel good about it" weeks. We've been working on customer orders, of course, but we also got four new instruments done and put up on the website. To see the four newest "for sale" instruments, click on this link. The page is sorted new-to-old, and the first four instruments on this page were new as of yesterday. They're all nice, but I especially liked playing this one. We used chrome tuners (made in Montana, of all places!) with ebony tuning knobs. This dulcimer looks sharp!
We're still working on customer instruments and also prepping for our two big summer festivals: Kentucky Music Week in June, and the ODPC Funfest in July. And making more parts for some DulciVoxes.
The plural of DulciVox sure looks strange to my eyes, but I think it is correct. Box as a plural would be boxes, and while "DulciVoxes" looks odd, it isn't as bad as "DulciVoxs" or "DulciVoxen." "Vox" is Latin for "voice," and the plural in Latin would probably be "voces," but "DulciVoces" is even stranger to my eyes!
Casey has been making shop fixtures (jigs) to make gluing and aligning parts more consistent and accurate. On the DulciVox below, the bridge ended up being 1/32" off center, so this body is destined for the trash heap. Maybe we can reuse the fretboard, but it'll be 50/50 whether it comes off of the body cleanly. But you can see the inside of the instrument, and I think it looks cool. Even though it isn't perfectly centered on the top!
And when he hasn't been making shop jigs for DulciVoxes (there it is again!), Casey's been working on finishing off another customer instrument. The dulcimer he's working on in the photo below will make it to the lacquer area tomorrow (Wednesday, May 1) and out to the stringing workbench early next week.
If you look closely in the upper part of the photo above, just a bit to the right of center, you'll see a blue plaid shirt. That's my dad! He's working on a big batch of our cardboard dulcimer fretboards. When Cheyenne saw me skulking through the shop with my camera out, he decided to head to our stringing area and avoid the fame of being featured in this week's newsletter. But I'll catch him next week, for sure.
About this newsletter. We send this email to about 12,000 people every Friday morning, and over half of you open the newsletter each week, and the vast majority of that "over half" follow a link or two. If you're at all involved with newsletters at your workplace, you know how good those statistics are, especially for a small company like Folkcraft. Part of that success is because "dulcimers are cool" (duh!), but a lot of it is because we have an awesome newsletter editor.
Our editor, Toya, has been working on our newsletters for years, and is the driving factor in making them look good. I write the first part of each newsletter (the paragraphs and photos you see above) and then Toya goes to work, selecting a few appropriate products (usually a dulcimer and a book) to feature, formats the entire thing, and schedules it to be sent on Friday morning at 10:00 AM, US Eastern Time. I first met Toya at one of the first festivals we hosted here at our shop: the Indiana Dulcimer Festival. She's a fine musician and plays a slew of acoustic instruments in a variety of groups.
We wouldn't have a newsletter without Toya, that's for sure. Here's a link to her Folkcraft Player page
Thanks for reading, Y'all - Go make some music, and have some fun now!
Richard Ash, luthier-who-gets-to-work-with-great-people-every-day