The stand, stained and finished

To take advantage of a recent stretch of good weather, I took the stand outdoors and, with my mother's help, applied stain and finish:


The legs and stretchers were first treated with a wood conditioner to minimize blotching, which maple can be prone to. Then two coats of a dark walnut gel stain were applied. When the stain was dry, four coats of satin finish (some kind of lacquer in aerosol form) were sprayed on and the final coat lightly rubbed with 0000 steel wool.

Now the interior moldings and the legs are a pretty decent colour match. I plan to make the music desk out of maple and finish it the exact same way.

The stand

Once again, several busy weeks got in the way of this project, and when work finally resumed last week, I wanted to do something that wouldn't take too long and would make a visible difference to the instrument, so I decided to make the stand. This also let me take the harpsichord off the saw horses it's been sitting on since last summer, which I've been tripping over from time to time in the crowded basement.


The legs come from Woodturners Incorporated, an outfit in eastern Ontario that sells turnings by Internet and mail order. I picked up 4 maple legs with a 2.25" cross-section, cut them down to 27" in length and joined them together in pairs with mortise-and-tenon joints, using two 3/4"-thick maple stretchers (the upper 3.5" wide, the lower 2.5" wide).

I connected the front and back pairs with two long stretchers, using 2" 1/4-20 bolts which thread into cross dowels embedded into the stretchers. I thought these would be safer than trying to put in threaded inserts, which might have split the thin ends of each stretcher.

The harpsichord is screwed to the stand with three 4"-long bolts that pass completely through the upper stretcher into threaded inserts set into the baseboard. This way I can pick up and move the whole instrument without it coming off the stand. Two dowels in the ends of the legs mate the instrument to the stand and align it with the screw holes for the bolts. It's amazing how many instruments I've encountered that aren't fastened to their stands. This makes repositioning the instrument an annoying task, if not a dangerous one: sometimes moving the instrument even a few inches is liable to tip the whole thing onto the floor!

I plan to peg the mortise-and-tenon joints to give them extra strength. Eventually the stand will be stained a dark walnut colour, which will match the bridge, nut and walnut moldings.