[__]: My name is [__] and I go to the school, the Art Institute of Chicago. I want to be a luthier. I want to apprentice for somebody.

It's called the Celloharp and my idea was to make an autoharp that sounded more like a guitar because I really hate that kind of plain sound that an autoharp usually has because it's really like some strings stacked on to a 2 x 4, so I wanted to give an autoharp a guitar body but I made it a little more dulcimer shaped because I like that too, and then I was thinking maybe I might want to bow it.

I've taken up the idea to use a cello tailpiece and a cello bridge, so I used that design and made the pieces based on the cello, so I call it the Celloharp.

It started out as a hurdy-gurdy. I wanted to make a bowable hurdy-gurdy, and without drone strings so that's the way it started out with that hand crank that came out of this side right here so that you could crank it, and then my other idea was to make a foot pump for the hurdy-gurdy so I was working for weeks on like figuring out how to make this wheel go around with the up an down kind of like bass drum pedal which didn't work very well, and to save time, I decided, I guess instead to make it into a harp and to save time, again, I took away the auto part and just made a harp so it's tuned chromatically so that anyone who can play a harp can play it. It's got 20 strings.

Bending the wood for the sides. I just couldn't figure out how to make a heating pipe so instead I made a mold in the same way that you'd make a classical guitar, and laid veneers inside the mold and glued them up. I have five layers of veneers making up the sides, and they're pretty strong so I don't even have to worry about bending the sides. They're made of mahogany so mahogany veneers, it's mahogany plywood I guess. I guess it's not a problem. I think it sounds pretty nice.

The bridge broke seven times. Every single time I built it with the grain going in a different direction, and every time it broke, and this time it's doing okay. This time the grain's going diagonally to the right. It hasn't broke when it went diagonally to the left, I don't even know. This is maple. The back and the neck are maple. This is mahogany. This is Jatoba which is a hardwood, and this is cedar. I based it off of a guitar so the wood choice for the backs of guitars are usually maple because they're a little denser and the sound kind of bounces off the back of and then boosts forth, and the tops are usually made of spruce in guitars but cedar can work too because it's very porous. I think Id definitely use spruce next time this cedar, really for the longest time before I lacquered it, if you just touched it with your fingernails, it would just dent right away. It was really a pain.

The neck is very heavy because of all the Jatoba up here. It's just a really heavy wood and then I've got a giant block of maple right here so it's really heavy over there and not over here which was a problem because I put the neck on before I put the back and the front on so this sides were actually bending and warping any time I'd pick it up so I had to get the back and front on really fast.

It also has a lot to do with tuning it. It's such a pain to tune. You have to tune the 10th string first and then the 11th string and then the 9th string and then the 12th string and then the 8th string but actually the way I did it was I tightened the 10th string while my friend tightened the 9th string at the same time and then I ended up tightening the 20th string and the 1st string and went back and forth from the middle to outside, to the middle to outside because it's balanced on this tailpiece fastener right here, which actually belongs to a cello, and that means that this part is really free and [SOUNDS LIKE] it's just kind of a pain, and so any time you tighten something over here, the tailpiece actually shifts so you had to get a completely -- it was such a pain. I've been through like tuning it for three days. I think I would make a fixed tailpiece. I think I will do it somehow.