His work in this area can be divided into two things:

         -He repaired music instruments and
         -He constructed Music instruments  -

I’m not sure how I knew he liked to repair instruments but I did.  So while hunting for a birthday present for him in 1958-6, I wandered into a junk shop on Brattle Street east of the Brattle Street Theatre. Sure enough, there was a Neopolitan mantolin that had been crushed severly. It looked like virtually all of the pieces were there but a lot of work was needed. A neopolitan banjo has the rounded back made out of alternating stripes of dark and light wood. What had happened was that the glue joints had been popped, and several strips were cracked or broken outright. I gave it to him for his birthday and he said thank you. I know he liked it because he did repair it and I’ll post a picture here when I get it, a lovely instrument.

I just had to ahve a conga drum in highschool to go with my bongo drums. This was the late 1950’s so cha-cha music was the rage, the Kingston Trio was on the scene, Harry Belafonte was in his prime with Banana Boat and so on. Since we didn’t have the money to buy a conga drum, dad said, “If you’ll figure out how to cut the wood, I’ll help you make a conga drum.” So I did, a tricky bit of calculating because the pieces had to taper from the top to the bottom, and the edges had to also taper inward so that the outer surface was longer than the inner surface. I don’t suppose I could figure it out today, but I was motivated then. So we but the dark pieces out of walnut and the white pieces out of a white fir, and with some trepidation, held them together. They seemed to fit, so we collected a bunch of amber rubber tubing and a lot of white glue and started to put it together. We also made two circular pieces the size of the twop end and of the bottom end to use as a splint to hold pieces in place while we assembled it. They fit perfectly. Then we put it on the lathe and turned it down, had Joe O’Leary made a drum head out of untanned deer hide and dad made a silver ring for the bottom to finish it off.

He repaired at least one Harmonium which was badly damaged, including turing some of the ornamental pieces needed to restore the design on the top of the case.
 

In 1967 he and I built a Harpsichord - Zucherman model - used on television  - need to get photo

       The last instrument that he built from scratch really was from scratch, i.e. from a photo. He saw a picture of an Egyptian Harp in a Berlin Museum and decided that he was going to reconstruct it, probably b ecause it was a challenge. The challenge came from the fadt that there was no glue holding anything together.  The strings themselves helded everything together.

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