Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

You can find the thread about my struggles with building this non-standard charango here.

Below the pictures (overdue since mid-2012) of the finished charango.

Materials:

Body: Mahogany
Neck: Mahogany with a centre strip of (if I remember well) "Quina", no idea if this is Myrocarpus frondosus or Hyeronima alchorneoides or maybe even something else!
Soundboard: Swiss spruce
Binding: Pear and maple
Fretboard, bridge, headplate and upper bout soundboard: some "rosewoods"
Tuning machines: Rubner (custom made base plate, price of custom machines go per number of tuners (strings) and materials used)
Varnish: Shellac ("french polish")








Thanks for looking.

Now that is serious. Will you be making one with an Armadilla back? ( Texas spelling ) CITES protected?

P Bill wrote: Will you be making one with an Armadilla back? ( Texas spelling ) CITES protected?

Currently I have one in here for repair (not the first one). Armadillo backs are not my favourite material to work with, to say the least. It is a highly unstable material, mainly hoof-like material held together by hygroscopic tendons... With time the whole structure of the armadillo back gets literally fold up if there is not a stable wooden rim or alternatively an overly thick soundboard present. Of course, if someone would give me a trashed armadillo-charango for free or for next to nothing I would "give it new life" which is, I would try to make at least a decent sounding instrument out of the remains, but I will not try to get a new armadillo to make a charango. Although, this would be possible without reducing endangered armadillo populations, because not all kinds of armadillos are endangered, "only" a few of them in Bolivia, Perú, Argentina and maybe their surrounding countries. Trading and shipping of non endangered armadillo species would still be a challenge though!

Hey markus, Cool instrument. I'd never heard of one before. What are the dimensions, and scale on it. It looks quite small, and an Armadillo(NY Speak) isn't the biggest critter in the plains...

I'm also curious as to what drew you to the charango as an instrument of choice. I'd doubt that the shops in Switzerland are full of them?

Nice looking instrument....

I really like that, kinda looks like a peanut

Col

charangohabsburg wrote: Currently I have one in here for repair (not the first one).

Very Lucky that you still have tools for these repairs Markus

Nice work by the way

Col, the peanut look is actually not the traditional one, it just happened to turn out like this because I wanted a bit more air volume of the box than an armadillo look would have allowed.

Nick, I first got envolved with the charango and its music when travelling in Perú and Bolivia almost 15 years back.
Scale length of this charango is 380 mm, lower bout width about 200 mm, body depth about 90 mm.

There are different sized armadillos (and armadillo species), some of them are big enough to make a guitar.

Tod Gilding wrote:Very Lucky that you still have tools for these repairs Markus

I'm liking this, the whole look is sweet, the headstock is huge compared to the rest of the instrument yet it just looks right and the contrasting top sits well too. How do you hollow it out and shape the back, any fancy Marcus/Swiss techniques or is it just plane and gouge and plenty of sweat?

Thanks for your kind words Nick.

There were no special Swiss techniques involved, and not too much sweat either, at least not with such an easy to carve wood I have worked with here.

Shaping the outside gets done with a chisel and then with spokeshaves (with rounded sole for the waist). Many charango builders use rasps and files for this task, which is slower and dirtier than using spokeshaves. In the end stage I used cabinet scrapers for the waist.

The hollowing out takes several steps. The bulk gets removed by drilling holes with a drill press followed by removing the wood between the holes with a chisel (hammering) and cleaning up the inner surface with a gouge. One can also use an angle grinder with a toothed wheel like the ones from Arbortech (or something similar) but it doesn't speed up the process much, if at all. Then the body goes again to the drill press, this time with a pin beneath the drill bit, with a spacing set at about 3 mm more than the desired maximum wall thickness. The rest (final wall thicknessing) gets done with a set of differently shaped gouges.

Looks great Markus. How thick is the back? Wayne

I keep coming back to look at this, it is really cool. It is unreal that they used armadillos for the backs, love it.

Col

Markus I like how the grain in the heel matches the body, have i got this right? How the bloody hell did you make/match that up, it looks like it was fairly difficult.

Steve

Just checked the photo again and reread posts so its the one piece, which makes it easy to match lol but a pain to carve?

Steve

Thanks again for your comments.

Wayne, the back of this charango is 6mm thick, except at the left and right side of the heel, where it is 8mm. However, charangos made of denser wood than mahogany tend to have a thinner back. I have measured charangos with backs as thin as 1.5 to 2 mm in the area of the lower bout, but in the upper bout area these backs were about 3 to 4 mm, and close to the heel up to 6 mm thick.

Indeed Steve, matching the heel and the body was fairly easy! Carving the whole thing, also the heel area, is not much more difficult than peeling a raw potato, even carving a neck is more demanding.

Last December Felix Pérez who is a gifted Bolivian musician and friend of mine played for me this little tune on my charango. I captured it only with a small photocamera, hence the poor recording quality.

Misterios del Corazón (Mysteries of the Heart), a "Takirari" (also spelled "Taquirari") by the Bolivian composer Roger Becerra:


youtu.be/

Nice job Marcus. Great job on carving the heal to body. Sounds good. I have never seen one of these. Ross