The string doesn't know what cut the case.
This shop runs on a bench full of hand planes and a CNC router, and sees no contradiction in that. The rule that sorts every job is simple: where the instrument speaks, hands decide. Where it doesn't, machines may repeat.
A harpsichord is two instruments in one skin. There is the acoustic instrument — soundboard, bridges, scaling, voicing — where thousandths of a millimeter and the flex under a thumb are the difference between a box that plays and an instrument that sings. And there is the joiner's instrument — case walls, framing, stand, lid — which is honest furniture, built to carry the first one for a few centuries.
The acoustic instrument gets the hand tools, the ear, and as many hours as it asks for. The joiner's instrument gets whatever tool does the job truest and safest — which in this shop might be a jack plane, a bandsaw, or a toolpath.
Hand tools
Layout, fitting, and finishing live here: jack, jointer, and smoothing planes; scrapers; paring chisels; a shooting board that earns its bench space every single week. Some operations are hand work not out of romance but because no machine has an opinion — thicknessing a soundboard is done against the flex and tap of the wood itself, not to a number, and voicing a rank of plectra is one knife, one quill or Delrin tongue, one note at a time, listening.
Hand work is also where the historical record is thickest. Plane tracks, scribe lines, and compass pricks survive inside original instruments; leaving the same marks with the same tools isn't nostalgia, it's staying legible to the next restorer.
Power tools
The bandsaw, jointer, planer, and drill press are the apprentices: they do the ripping, flattening, and dimensioning that an eighteenth-century shop gave to actual apprentices, and they complain less. Casework stock comes off the machines square and true, then meets edge tools for joinery and surfaces. No apologies for this — a straight, stable case wall is a straight, stable case wall, whoever squared it.
CNC router
The CNC earns its keep on work that is repetitive, precise, and acoustically silent: register slots, jigs and bending forms, keyboard blanks with balance-pin locations drilled to the drawing, rose blanks, template work for case joinery. A harpsichord has dozens of parts that must be identical to their neighbors — the machine repeats; the hand still fits, because wood moves and drawings don't.
Laser
The laser handles templates, layout patterns, and marking — full-size patterns from measured drawings, engraved reference marks, and experiments in pierced-rose work. It is the shop's drafting department: anything that starts as a line on a drawing can become a physical pattern in minutes, which changes how often you're willing to test an idea.
CNC lathe
Next on the floor: a CNC lathe. First assignment, turned stand work — Flemish-pattern baluster legs are a lot of identical spindles, which is exactly the kind of job the rule above assigns to a machine. Progress notes will land on the workshop page as it comes online.
Early in the Ruckers build, the standing advice from more than one traditional maker was blunt: don't use the CNC machine for any part of an instrument. Fair enough — and mostly followed. But the jacks tell the real story. They were shaped by hand with a Lie-Nielsen plane; the machine's only job was to cut the jig that held each identical body square while the plane did the work. That is the whole philosophy in one operation: the machine holds, the hand decides. The full account is on the build blog.
Tardus et Stabilis
Slow and steady — the whole method in two wordsIs that historical?
It's the most historical thing about the shop. The Ruckers workshop of 1640 was not a hermitage — it was a high-volume Antwerp business that used molds, patterns, jigs, division of labor, and standardized parts to build instruments faster and more consistently than anyone else in Europe. Their soundboards were painted by specialists; their case papers came off printing blocks; their geometry came off layout rules, not inspiration. The historical builders used the best production technology of their century, without sentiment.
What they never delegated was judgment: the wood chosen, the scaling drawn, the crow quill cut. That line — repetition to the tools, judgment to the maker — is the line this shop keeps. The result has to be true where the instrument speaks. The sawdust doesn't remember who made it.