Presumably as part of his interest in the cello Charles decided to build a stringed instrument in his workshop today. He got the base structure done all by himself but didn’t have much luck in getting rubber bands on as his strings. To entice me in to helping him, he managed to actually speak “Daddy, can you help me?” in a mumbling voice. That turned in to a project that took a big chunk of the rest of the day, but after a couple of dead ends we hit on a structure that mostly works, which you can see here with Timmy.
In hindsight, I probably should have just found rubber bands long enough to wrap around the entire length. Instead I bought a set of drill bits for my dremel and let Charles drill some holes with a power tool. I thought I could stretch the rubber bands through and tie them off on dowel chunks but that just didn’t work. We discovered that we could jam one of Charles’ small dowels in the holes and then tie the strings to that. The tieing is a bit tricky, but doable, and the posts look kind of cool. Charles seems to be happy with the result, and Alice likes it too.