Two instruments, and the honest account of building them.
This is the working half of the shop: a Flemish single built from raw wood after the 1640 Andreas Ruckers at Yale, and a bentside spinet from a Hubbard kit after Baker Harris, 1765. The running, day-by-day version — with the mistakes left in — lives on the build blog. This page is the standing summary.
The Ruckers 1640
The centerpiece of the shop is a single-manual Flemish harpsichord after the 1640 Andreas Ruckers — the original of which lives at the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments. Not a kit: raw wood, measured drawings, and the long way round. The disposition follows the original — one 8-foot and one 4-foot register on a single keyboard — the plainest and, to a lot of ears, the sweetest voice the Flemish school ever produced.
Two people made this build possible, and both are named on purpose. The first is Ernest Miller, whose Harpsichord Project eBook documents the construction of this exact instrument, chapter by chapter, for the first-time builder — this shop's own words on the blog were that the project would never have been attempted without it. The second is Owen Daly of Salem, Oregon, whose mentorship turned a book's instructions into decisions a beginner could actually make. That's how this craft has always moved — one maker handing the next a drawing and an answer.
It is a slow build, and meant to be. The jacks were made in-house; the soundboard thicknessed by hand and ear; the case worked with a mix of tools described on the Tools & Methods page. The blog carries the rest — including the parts that had to be done twice.
The Hubbard bentside spinet
The second instrument is a bentside spinet built from a Frank Hubbard kit. A spinet is the small, domestic cousin of the harpsichord: a single 8-foot choir, strings running diagonally away from the player and plucked nearer their middles, giving a strong, sustained, slightly darker tone — and it needs only about six feet of wall. The bentside spinet was an Italian invention of around 1630 (Girolamo Zenti), perfected in eighteenth-century London.
One point of precision, because it is almost always gotten wrong: the Hubbard spinet is not "after Hitchcock," the usual guess for an English spinet. It is a close copy of a 1765 bentside spinet by Baker Harris of Denmark Street, London — an instrument Frank Hubbard himself restored in 1975, drawing the plans with the original beside his bench. The kit is still made to those drawings.
The specification reproduces the Baker Harris almost exactly: 60 notes, five octaves (FF, GG–f‴), a single 8-foot register strung in brass, designed for a′ = 415, about six feet long and roughly seventy pounds, dressed in figured walnut veneer with maple stringing and mahogany crossbanding on a turned-leg trestle stand. Where the Ruckers is the long road, the spinet is the disciplined one — a professionally drawn kit, assembled and voiced to the maker's own standard.
Documented from Hubbard's own kit sheets: the 1765 Baker Harris offering sheet (archived). Hubbard Harpsichords’ site went offline in late 2025; the archive preserves the record.
Tardus et Stabilis
Slow and steady — the only way either of these gets builtRead the build as it happened
Summaries flatten the interesting parts. The blog doesn't: a jack production line held in CNC-cut jigs and finished with a hand plane, a soundboard roasted to stabilize it, a Dremel run on linear rails, and the ordinary catastrophes of a first big build. If you want to see what these two instruments actually cost in hours and false starts, that's where it is.
The Ruckers 1640 build diary →
And if you want the philosophy behind the tools — why some cuts are made by hand and others by machine, and why that's the historical way of working rather than a betrayal of it — that's the Tools & Methods page.