Removing the chord box

I have always had a slight phobia of musical instruments in danger of falling or breaking. When the finetuner on my violin broke off with a loud BANG while I was playing, I needed about five minutes to calm down. When a friend told me about how he saw an entire row of harps falling down like dominoes, my heart rate shot up (and I wasn't even there to witness it). My boyfriend once accidentally dropped my violin in its case, and I have never let him touch it since. Conclusion: dismantling this autoharp was going to be difficult for me!

The lid and chord bars came right off.

However, I told myself that removing the chord box was going to be in its best interest: the lid was almost coming off by itself so with a high-pitched scream, I did it: I lifted the lid of the chord box. A small personal victory.

This blog post will be about what I found beneath the lid. Dum dum DUUMMM.

As I said, it didn't recquire much effort to lift the lid off. The screws were rusty and were not stuck in wood, so it was literally a question of lifting it off. As could be expected: it was quite dusty underneath. Through the sound hole, I can see cobwebs, so I definitely need to clean that out in some way or other (preferably, without having to open up the entire sound box). If someone has a genius idea about how to do that, let me know!

OK, so, the felt. It is in a better state than I had expected! I'm still planning on replacing them though.

Something I find fascinating about the chord bars, is that every chord bar has a digit, so the bars are in the right order. But for some reason, someone found it useful to write them in roman numerals as well. I have no idea why someone would see the added value in that..? Maybe the arabic numerals were added later?

Numbers on the chord bars

In some places, these white thingies
came loose, so I glued them back on. 

On the lid itself, something is written in pencil. I have years of experience in reading medieval Irish manuscripts, but this, I cannot make sense of (which I take very personally). That last thing might be a digit, but I don't know for sure. I find it very exciting, though!

The chord bars were very easy to remove from the lid: the brass buttons could be unscrewed quite easily. I cleaned them, and reattached them to the chord bars for now (so I don't lose them. Because I am quite a small-object-losing-person). What I noticed during cleaning, is that there used to be gold paint on the buttons. I think this is another sign that this 'harp was definitely well loved at some point, since the paint would only wear off the places it did when it was played. This makes me very happy, because it had not been used for three generations.

This concludes this blog post for now. I am planning on removing the strings next, and giving the entire harp a nice clean-up, so it will shine like never before!

On the upper button, you can see
traces of golden paint.

The mysterious pencil writing