Morin Khurr Plan

Okay.  You asked for it.

Lately I'm being inundated with requests for information about the morin khurr I put together several years ago. Every week there's at least one email from someone - all ages, from all walks of life, and from around the world.

Let's be clear. I'm not an expert in traditional morin khurr construction. I built only one, using techniques borrowed from guitar making. It's playable and the owner is very pleased with it.
There was no resource material available to me when I began the project, and I scaled the dimensions up from a photograph I found online. As luck would have it they were very close to those I later measured when I got my hands on an authentic instrument.

So far, of the many people who have contacted me about building them, I've only seen one person follow through and complete a morin khurr (it was amazing). 

I'm not going to teach you luthiery via email. It's just too difficult. If you're the inquisitive kind of person who wants to build an instrument you need to develop self-reliance and trust your instincts. I'm providing the basic dimensions but I'm leaving details and construction techniques up to the builder. This should be enough information for people with some experience building guitars, violins, or other stringed instruments to get started on a plan of their own. (Click on the image to enlarge and then you can right-click to save to your computer).

Total Length:  41.5"    1054mm

Width at bottom of box: 11-1/8"   282.5mm

Width at top: 8"   203mm

Box length: 12-1/14"   311mm

Neck, nut to body: 17-7/8"    452mm

String Length: nut to bridge: 22-5/16"  566mm

Neck width at body: 24mm 

Neck width at nut: 22 mm

Neck thickness: 22mm at nut tapers to 30mm at place where curve begins

Fingerboard thickness: 4mm (neck is flush with body plane, board is above it)

Nut height: 16mm to bottom of string

Bridge height: 35mm

Tailpiece length: 6"  150mm

Side depth: 92mm (no taper)

Plate thickness at edge:  4.5-5mm

rounded corner blocks inside

Top arching at the bridge rises to about 8mm

Soundpost about 7mm diameter

String spacing: 19mm at nut,  30mm at bridge. (outside edge to outside edge)

A Morin Khuur repair.

I receive a large number of comments and emails regarding a Mongolian instrument I built some years back and profiled on this blog.  At the time, I had only a few photos to work from and extrapolated things like string length and box dimensions by scaling up details from the pictures.

Recently I was contacted by the owner of a bona-fide genuine Mongolian-made fiddle. She has had difficulty keeping it in tune from the beginning and wondered if there was something I could suggest. We discussed options and I came upon a plan to retrofit it with mechanical tuning machines.

To start with, for a student-grade instrument it has some beautiful carving.  The tapered pegs it was fitted with didn't seem to correspond to the usual 1:30 found on violas, or the 1:25 commonly found on cellos.

The multistranded nature of morin khuur strings necessitates a large diameter peg. Unfortunately the materials used here weren't up to the task. The pegbox seems to be made from a fruitwood, and the pegs themselves *might* be an Asian variety of soft maple.

The wood is just too soft and fibrous. Assuming I had a peg shaver large enough to deal with these, I'm confident they would quickly deform.  No amount of peg compound is going to help this situation!

The cheeks of the peg box were too narrow to accommodate the electric bass tuners I had in mind so I made up a couple of little risers.

The shafts fit nicely into the vacant peg holes.  I scribed around them...

And scraped back to bare wood for gluing purposes.  Note the knot with bark inclusion! 

A coat of colored varnish makes the risers less visually obtrusive.  You can see manner in which the strings are held in place through the lower peg hole.  I made a slip knot and cinched the string through the split shaft. It was a tight fit working in the confines of the pegbox but it didn't take long.  Those thinking of trying this for themselves might graft a smaller diameter cord to the end of their strings to make the job less fiddlesome.

The owner expressed some remorse about having to lose the traditional appearance because the pegs are stylized ears, after all.  I reasoned that by fitting the pegs into the exit holes, which are considerably smaller  I could mark where they fit snugly, amputate, and then graft the resultant nub back onto the shaft. Some glue and a screw hold them together.

It worked well!  As do the machine heads.  Tuning is now a breeze.

It's a handsome instrument. The box is made entirely of cedar.  I'm not exactly sure how the arching was accomplished, as it's all in one plane around the perimeter.