Portfolios
Miscellany
Daniel Joseph Betsill, luthier, et al
Artist's Profile, UGA Website 2008
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Laying out the Choc peghead veneer.
Tha-a trim-ming of tha mer-ry peg-head sweet sing-ing in tha choir! I'm listening to Alfred Deller while I do this. Chirstmas has not worn off yet.
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Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Bending the liners for the Baroque guitar.
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Saturday October 22, 2011
Another Baroque guitar in the making. See this page the project log of the previous instrument.
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Sunday, August 7, 2011
This is the beginnings of a provencial dining table sinilar to the one I made for our breakfast area, with curved legs and profield streachers. The legs are two 2x4's here clamped up two at a time. One of the 1x6 boards for the top is standing on edge getting biscuits fixed in place for joining. This will be a nice 2-tone antiqued paint-finished table that looks like any you'd care to buy from Pottery Barn but costs about $30 in materials because it's made from lumber from Home Depot. See the furniture page for details as it progresses.
And a bevy of bowls that just got finished. Upper left is another "Emory Oak", the front and center is an "Olmstead Park" which warped nicely although it's had to see fron this angle. Upper right is a bowl which I really didn't like the shape of but the rubbed out gold leaf makes it good.
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Wednesday, July 21, 2011
Progress on the Baroque guitar. See this page for project log
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Sunday, July 10, 2011
The beginnings of a crook-shape walking stick. Clamping up the assembly with waterproof Tightbond. See the Stickmaking page for the rest of the process
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Saturday, April 30, 2011
The baroque guitar peghead is complete, with the pegs rough tapered, standing a little tall. With some of the implementia of peg making.
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Sunday, April 24, 2011
Working on the pegs for the baroque guitar. Here the new shape (lower) compared to the shape I've previously used which is more like a theorbo. Elegant, but hard to tune. Live and learn. The new shape being closer to that found on the original, anyway.
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Saturday, March 5, 2011
Work resumes on the Baroque guitar. See this page for project log
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Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Working on a prop bench for this year's church play. I'm experimenting with spray-on drwall texture to create a stone-look surface.
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Monday, January 31, 2011
An open back banjo is complete. See this page for project details.
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Tuesday, January 11, 2010
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The rebirth of the kitchen table. See the furniture page for details
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Tuesday, January 4, 2010
Shannon's new display case. See the furniture page for a few process photos.
A strumstick is complete
I got to do a little painting over the holidays. See the painting page for process protos of this.
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Thursday, December 9, 2010
Progress on an openback banjo neck. Fret slot and binding channel cutting complete.
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Tuesday, December 7, 2010
At the end of a long night of work, a shot for reflection on how much work I have going on at one time. From left to right: Banjo rim, baroque guitar body clamped in form, banjo neck in progress, bowls in progress on lathe and bandsaw, canvas taped to wall awaiting landscape cartooning. . . Not visible: renaissance cittern neck carving, strumstick body glue-up, dogwood stool leg mortising. This year's Christmas gift theme: "what can I make for you?"
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Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Progress on the new DaSalo. Shaping the most confounding trainwreck of shapes that is the heel of a Renaissance cittern. Who came up with this crazy shape?
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Saturday, October 30, 2010
A second DeGive dulcimer in the works. The frets for the first instrument were of the largest packing staple I could find at my local hardware store. They weren't quite wide enough to play all three strings easily. So I'm pounding them out for this instrument to make them wider.
Like many of the old makers, I am leaving my scribe marks: the lines I made to position the drill holes for the frets. When I pick up an old instrument, I like seeing the evidence of how the maker worked.
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Saturday, October 16, 2010
Two instrument necks in progress. An open back banjo and a Renaissance cittern.
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Friday, October 15, 2010
Another "DeGive" Dulcimer in the works. Showing here the raw material, the studs of the 1911 DeGive House in Ansley Park, complete with my marker tag to the contractor designating which pieces I wanted salvaged. The sides and back pieces are sawn and planed, the scroll and endblock are complete and the fingerboard is planed to size, with a few objects of ejectus. Click here to see the making of the first instrumnet from this wood.
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Thursday, September 23, 2010
Progress on the "Victorian TV Stand". See the Furniture page for more progress images.
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Thursday, September 2, 2010
Working on a 19th century-styled tenor banjo for my Victorian costume for DragonCon. Not many hours left! See my banjo page for more images.
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Monday, August 30, 2010
Working on a Victorian-inspired TV stand in ash. If the Victorians had TVs, they would sit on something like this.
Turning the face pilasters
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Saturday, July 31, 2010
An Eastlake-styled bookcase for Shannon in ebonized ash.
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A new pair of stools made from the dogwood tree that came down in our yard a few weeks ago. See the furniture page for project details.
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Wednesday, June 30, 2010
The tie stand is complete. I hated to paint over that figured maple, but this piece incorporates a previous bowtie stand I made a number of years ago which was painted black.
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Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Slowly I turn. . .
. . .very slowly. 520 rpm to be exact. The length of this piece (about 40") means deflection is a big problem. This is going to be a floor-standing necktie stand.
Tee Hee. More adventures in kiddie guitars. I got this from World Market for $20. It's billed as a 'child's guitar' but it was completely unplayable in its purchased state: action WAY too high and friction tuning machines so slack that holding any kind of pitch is impossible, combined with poor string gauging (only about 0.015" differential between highest and lowest string). But I saw a mini Spanish renaissance guitar - or some kind of modern descendant like a Quinta - in the making. A little professional lutherie inflicted and one trip-to-the-craft-shop later and we have a 4-course freakshow. I have it tuned in tenor banjo intervals in an open-A tuning. Check out the off-the-shelf scrapbooking sticker that's almost identical to a standard baroque guitar mustache bridge! Synchronicity!
Next to charango for scale.
World Market photo of original condition
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Tuesday, June 8, 2010
A couple of sexy shots of the cedar box I just completed. This is for a client who's building his home of the material. The box was made out of an 18" cuttoff of a 6x12 beam
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Friday, May 7, 2010
The betsill workshop: your bachi-making headquarters! This is the plectrum for a Chikuzen biwa. It's the third commission in as many years I have had for one of these implements. Mahogany for the body, boxwood for the blade. When I think of all the bachi-less biwas out there it breaks my heart. See the biwa page for more bachis.
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Friday, April 2, 2010
Occasionally I get furniture commissions (FF&E as we say in the biz). These frames were made for an IT training company on a budget. They didn't really have an art budget so this conference room and training room were spiced up with large framed Maharam wallpaper panels. Idea/space design courtesy of Insight Design Inc.
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Monday, February 1, 2010
About 15 years ago I made a mailbox with elaborate turned finials for my grandmother. It had a good long life before someone ran into it this past Christmas. See my furniture page for details of the replacement. Also in this picture is a spalted magnolia bowl recently completed
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Thursday, January 7, 2010
Here's a sexy shot of the latest tenor cittern.
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Workshop in a closet.
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Online Chap Book:
And
did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
-William Blake
Live with the gods. And he does live with the gods who constantly shows to them that his own soul is satisfied with its daimon, that portion of himself that Zeus has given to every man to be his guardian and guide and that his soul does all that the daimon wishes. And this is every man's understanding and reason.
-Marcus Aurelius
And there the sunset skies unseal’d, Like lands he never knew, /Beyond to-morrow’s battle-field /Lay open out of view /To ride into.
-D.G. Rossetti, from The Staff and Script
Let Athene dwell in the cities she's founded. For me, the woodlands.
-Virgil
He slept thus until late morning, while the pillows arranged themselves into a large flat plain on which his now quieter sleep would wander. On these white roads, he slowly returned to his senses, to daylight, to reality - and at last he opened his eyes as does a sleeping passenger when the train stops at a station.
-Bruno Schultz, from The Cinnamon Shops
Deus Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
-Rudolph Otto
Are you angry with him whose armpits stink? Are you angry with him whose mouth smells foul? What good does this anger do you? He has such a mouth, he has such armpits: it is necessary that such an emination must come from such things. But the man has reason, it will be said, and he is able, if he takes pains, to discover wherein he offends. . .there is no need of anger, the stuff of tragic actors and whores.
-Marcus Aurelius
Green aisles of Pullman cars/ Soothe me like trees/ Woven in old tapestries/ I love to watch the stars/ Remote above the earth/ In watery light,/ while in the lower berth./ I whirl through the night.
-William Rose Benet
With faith, discipline and selfless devotion to duty, there is nothing worthwhile that you cannot achieve.
-Jinnah
The
full streams feed on flower of rushes, /Ripe grasses trammel a traveling
foot, /The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes/
From leaf to flower and flower to fruit;/And fruit and leaf are as gold
and fire,/And the oat is heard above the lyre, /And the hoofèd
heel of a satyr crushes /The chestnut husk at the chestnut root.
-Swinburne
Both music and dance are voices of the way.
-Zenji Hakuin
For the dulcimer rhimes are grace place and the like.
-Christopher Smart