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I guess I'll declare the cittern "done," or at least done enough to do the show-and-tell routine..

I'm quite pleased by the way it turned out.

The green triangular blocks in the case came out of a banjo case. They don't work with my banjo, but I think they will do a good job holding the cittern headstock.

Impressive! Have the cittern players been at it yet?

Wow, it turned out Great! Nice job on the case.

nice to see different instruments. it is pretty

I'm trying to find a time when Jud Caswell can take it for a test drive. I plan to record the occasion so I can post a decent sound sample. Jud is eager to try it out, buit he is extremely busy. It will happen, eventually.

I'm getting so it doesn't feel totally alien when I try to play it, but I still can't do much with it.

Here's a sound sample, mostly demonstrating that I can't play it very well. <grin>

It does show, I hope, the sustain and the bass response.

Wow! What a beautiful rich sound. Thats a beautiful instrument.

very nice indeed
did you make the case

Yes, I built the case. It was a design-on-the-fly operation that fortunately worked out fairly well. I wouldn't recommend relying on it to protect against rough handling. The foam padding I used is only 1/4" thick and quite soft, and the top and bottom are 3/16" luan plywood. Any baggage handler could destroy it -- and the cittern -- with ease. For at-home storage and personal transporting, however, it's fine.

I used the 3/16" luan to keep the weight down. I used 1/4" lumber for the sides, for the same reason. Even so, it's still pretty heavy. I used 1/4" foam in an attempt to keep the overall size as small as I could. Even so, it's still pretty big.

One idea I had, but didn't try, was to cover it in Kevlar cloth embedded in epoxy to add strength.

Today I was able to connect with Jud Caswell long enough for him to take the cittern for a test drive. A couple of things came out of that. One, I still need to work on getting the action right. (I knew that anyway.) Two, individual notes are more distinct on Jud's cittern than on mine. It's not a big difference, but both Jud and I agreed that it was the case. Three, my cittern seems to have a partiality to a mid-bass resonant frequency. Again, it's nothing that is particularly glaring, but we speculate that it may be the cause of the lack of crispness of individual notes; the tendency to favor that mid-bass frequency tends to weaken other frequencies. Maybe.

Regarless, it still sounds pretty good. Here's a sound sample of Jud playing it. Unlike me, he knows what he's doing.