Many of you have seen the list of technical drawings on the CIMCIM site 
but theres little info to indicate if they are working or documentation 
type drawings and most can be expensive A drawing made by a builder who 
is trying to communicate how to build will be most useful. These are 
available more for clavichords an also spinets. You can be greatly 
mislead spending tons of money on a plan and finding little information. 
One of the all time best drawings was available with the EarlyMusic 
Workshop kit for the anon clavichord. John Barnes actually altered the 
original improving it. Marc Ducornets' delin spinet in a very careful 
enlargement of the original which works.
     For years I had wanted to build a muselar and the only plan was the 
1650 Couchet. When I built it as shown the pitch was very low but the 
sound was fabulous. I read in Obrien's book how 4 1/2 foot virginals 
intended for quart pitch could be strung in brass at modern pitch. I had 
to try again with the Boston Museum's muselar. The only drawing was in 
Kosters' book so I scaled it out and the result was great. Why not build 
a brass strung harpsichord in the original Ruckers scaling. I had to 
draft a plan with all the right string lengths but again I had a fremish 
single only 60" long.
     With clavichords you don't have to worry about absolute pitch as 
most small ones are higher than modern.
Harpsichords really need to be scaled right to sound at the pitch you 
want. Photo reduction of drawings allows you to calculate the instrument 
size to the pitch. Sometimes you can determine what pich the original 
was and design with that in mind. Before harpsichord wire many antiques 
and there modern copies were crushed by the use of music wire which 
would pull all the way to modern pitch.
    another example was the instrument I made based on the lovely 
Domenicus Pisuarensis in Leipzig. The original was iron strung at 470 or 
higher. If you transpose the keyboard down a minor 3rd you have a very 
usable C-d3 chromatic instead of C?E f3 and you string it in brass.
If you want a good Ruckers drawing you get the 1/2 size Vleeshuis 1644 
and build it at 1/2 step low.A good rule is 10" c2 for brass at modern 
pitch  12 1/2 c2 for soft iron wire. The normal 18th c french pitch was 
close to a 400 when the c2 got to 13"  Modern instruments are hardly 
ever strung to the calculated tension they were needing.
     I was greatly surprised to find that older iron scale italians 
sounded smoother and darker than their 18th century brass strung 
cousins. Iron scale french spinets are reedy compared to brass strung 
english spinets.
Even a 415 is to high a pitch for many historically scaled 
instuments.     Jack Peters