German Scheitholt 5 string 2019 Shellac

I just finished making this and am really impressed with the nice full sound it gets with more base and longer melody resonance. The 4 inch height of the sides makes it much different. My inspiration for making this comes from my years of living in Germany and often traveling to Austria. Also in one of the foxfire books I see something very similar in height and shape on the porch of an old instrument maker so this instrument is a deep part of the shaping of Appalachia and shaping of music. The scheitholt was the main influence of what we know as the mountain dulcimer and so I have used a dulcimer diatonic fret scale here which measures 26 inches from nut to bridge. The bridge is a wonderful piece of tiger stripe maple, the top is quarter sawn species of pine that came from a house built in WV in the 1870’s. The back is vintage maple and sides are of popular one side has amazing grain figure patterns and the other side has some nice black spalting lines and tones so there is a lot going on here. The fret board is walnut and the scroll head I designed to be an accurate scheitholt design of solid one piece walnut which was not easy to do and was lucky I had seasoned walnut that thick. The zither pins are standard and a number 13 size hole was drilled in as is the right size. I really liked how this turned out as it is not only a great instrument to play but it is a living piece of our past. I was going to make this a 4 string but after trying it out decided to add another bass string and that really has brought out its potential. All strings on this do rest above frets so it can be played in chords. Some scheitholts I have made well only two previously had the not the two melody strings on top of a narrow fretboard with room enough for only them. I also think it is interesting to note that the more in-depth I went with these old designs there are many old Scandinavian instruments in this shape with the high sides and varied from Norway to Sweden to Iceland and Denmark. There is even a Dutch instrument and Lithuanian instruments similar to this though some like the psalmodicon was played with violin bow also and I think this one could be bowed also. If you request I can probably add more frets to make it chromatic for a few dollars more.