I'm constantly amazed by the stuff that shows up on the Modern Mechanix Website:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/05/02/...amp;Qis=XL#qdig
I guess, to pun-ish you, I could say that he fiddled around a lot!
Actually, I'm wrong; he calls this thing a harp and it uses the fiddle shape as a resonant cavity:
QUOTE
Even more massive is another product of Ferris’s upstairs workshop. This is the biggest harp in the world. Completed only a few weeks ago, it tips the scales at more than 400 pounds. Eighty-three of its ninety-nine strings are made of steel. Some of these vibrating wires are nearly 100 inches long. One unusual feature of the mammoth harp is a row of double strings forming a series of V’s. Opposite strings are tuned differently. When one is plucked, sympathetic vibrations are set up in the other, and unusual tonal effects are produced. Two or more musicians can play on different parts of the great harp at the same time.
To help in playing the largest of his instruments, Ferris has constructed a platform five feet high and about eight feet square. Around it, the ten players who have appeared with Ferris in concerts in several eastern towns group themselves with their odd assortment of instruments. Five of these players are distant relatives of the late John D. Rockefeller. Another is Herbert Colburn, one of the fiddlers hired by Henry Ford some years ago, when the Detroit manufacturer tried to revive old-time country dances.
Among the unconventional instruments these musicians play is a curious “bridal lap harp,” a combination of harp and violin. It requires two players to operate it. While a girl plucks the harp, a man moves a bow across the violin strings. The result is a curious duet from a single instrument.
As a present for his wife on her sixtieth birthday, Ferris designed a huge “whispering harp.” The sound from the vibrating strings grows in volume as it enters a large violin-shaped body to which the harp is attached.
