Hi David,

Well, regarding what you say seriously for a moment, I feel the point about
this oft discussed topic is that in the active historical periods craftsmen
were working in established workshops where the type of instrument became
quite standardised, with perhaps a handful of variations. Take the output of
the Ruckers dynasty workshops for example. Once you are up and running with
a successful musical solution and commercial design, after a time makers
would accumulate jigs, templates, measuring sticks, marking out rules,
trammels and geometric guides for laying out the instrument, and scantlings
would have been standardized, and once you have settled on a keyboard design
it's easy to keep making them the same. In a quantity oriented workshop like
this, common all over Europe, the need for full scale drawings would have
been minimal.

The main purpose for us today that I see for full size plans, or plans on
any scale, is to transmit the complete knowledge of an instrument to us, as
we do not have access to the accumulated active wisdom and experience of the
old shops. So if we want to learn Ruckers, we are fortunate to have
drawings. If we want to learn Blanchet, we are fortunate again, and so on.

I think it's all a matter of context. If we were cranking out 300
instruments a year, we would not be painstakingly building each single one
off a mylar plan, transferring every measurement with a steel ruler. So
partly the attachment to plan drawings is because contemporary makers often
make many schools of instruments, or a new model for every customer request
within reason. Things are different to the historical context and tradition.

There's a lot more on this topic, but hopefully I have conveyed the gist of
what I mean, expressed poorly very likely!

Andrew



-----Original Message-----
From: Harpsichords and Related Topics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of David Pickett
Sent: Sunday, 19 March 2017 7:16 PM

The upside of this (he wrote tongue in cheek) may be that it forces
harpsichord builders to turn to more authenticke methods used in the olden
tymes that do not rely upon 1:1 drawings.

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