Tag Archives: Restoration

Tumba Horror

Sitar Factory Posted on by

A while ago, I received this mail:

Hallo,

I got the chance to buy an old Rikhi Ram GP Sitar for 40€ only (the 60yo sellers dad died and she kept it since~30yrs ago so I would guess 1970s or 80s).

The sitar looks very good and has the white/gold Rikhi Ram label, but the gourd is broken on two positions or more. Some parts of the gourd they kept, some parts are missing. Someone unfortunately already tried to repair it without any success, the repaired pieces look extremely shitty glued 😀
I would like to get the sitar repaired, but I wouldn’t trust me to do it so I thought Ill contact you as I follow your blog enthusiastically for some time now.

Can I maybe send you some pictures to get you an impression of the damage? Since the sitar just stood around for 30ish years, I would like to get a full facelift done of everything plus jawari of course.

Sören, from Germany

A while later, the sitar has arrived…
Terrible what happened to this sitar:

It is difficult to find out what product was used. I think it must have been a hard synthetic glue on the inside, and then overlaid by a hard hot glue on the outside.

The good news is that the construction on the inside is well done firmly, so that is a good point. I can remove the hard glue on the outside with a chisel and make it smooth again. The tumba is definitely repairable. It does have a few pieces missing, but I can repair them with pieces from another broken tumba I have lying around here.

Once the tumba is ready, I can remove the remnants of that shitty glue on the outside with sandpaper and smooth the surface. A new black wax bond is also applied.

Followed by a finish with new colour & shellac lacquer layers.

The rest of the sitar looks fine. All the pegs are ok but turn very stiffly, the frets are oxidised but of fine quality, a good bridge in horn is present and intact and the joint is tight.


Finally frets repolishing and binding, new strings, doing jawari and tuning etc…

I think this sitar is definitely worth all the work. It is a common good quality Rikhi Ram Gandhar Pancham 70-80’s model that has potential to be a good sounding & reliable sitar. So be it! 🙂

Hemen sitar restoration

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Hemendra Chandra Sen, passed away in 2010, was a very well known sarod and sitarmaker. His shop was situated near Deshapriya Park in South Kolkata. There he mainly made sarods for the most world famous players such as Alauddin Khan and his son, Ali Akbar Khan, Amjad Ali Khan and the young generation Tejendra Narayan, Partha Sarathi and Kamal Mallik. But also his rare sitars became very famous. I used to lay hand on one, made in the 70’s according to the previous owner. The sitar is in good condition but some restoration work has to be done. The shellac finish needs to be re freshened, all pardas cleaned and tied up, kutis re-fitted, mounting new strings & doing jawari. Now it is ready for a second (third or fourth ??) life.

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Hiren Roy 70’s refurbish

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Hiren Roy 70’s refurbished…

Peeling tumba & crack repair with color change…

before

after

New jawari ghoraj mounted…

Dieter Zarnitz jawari ghoraj with Cumaru top & Angelim Amargoso feet installed.

 

Pardas added…

Added RE komal & DHA komal, 23 pardas in total.

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Rikhi Ram 70’s restoration

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Michel DumontEarly 1970, Michel Dumont (Musician, flutist, graduate of the conservatories of Brussels and Valencienne, who became a theatre and opera decorator at La Monnaie/De Munt) together with his wife Martine Mergeay (journalist and music reviewer at La Libre Belgique, Le Vif/L’Express and Musiq3) went to India to explore and learn about Indian Classical Music. They meet Ravi Shankar and purchase a sitar at the Rikhi Ram shop in New Delhi. They stay one year in Benares and face a profound study about raga in instrumental (Michel) as well as in vocal (Martine) techniques.

Last year (2020) unfortunately Michel passed away after suffering a long disease. His sitar remains alone…

It finally arrives on my table. It has clearly not been played on for a long time. The strings and pardas are rusted and there is a lot of dust on the body. The lacquer on the soundboard has been severely cracked and there is a dull and matte appearance to the whole instrument. The decorations are faded out.

Then I quickly started to remove all the worn parts and the pardas. The lacquer was well sanded and given a new layer of varnish. The decorations were then carefully and neatly scraped off. Then I cleaned and polished all the pardas and put them back on with new orange wires. The tuning pegs, too, were given a thorough cleaning and were given a good layer of fresh chalk. The original label was missing, so I copied it by hand as was common in those days. The sitar is also getting a new stagghorn jawari ghoraj and, of course, new strings. This extraordinary sitar is now ready for a new life…

And it is one of the best-sounding sitars I have ever held in my hands. The tarav response is exceptional and the tone is particularly well balanced. It is made of exquisite teak wood in an era when a new instrument was still built with great care and of course, by one of the most passionate and experienced builders in India…

See here the result:

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Benares tanpura repair

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One day I received a quite damaged and almost demolished tanpura. “Children have been playing with it…” was the comment of the owner. I wonder what game they have been playing, but it was certainly not a peaceful game. Or, at least at some time it went out of hands… as one can say?

The tanpura seems to be an old instrument, bought in Benares in the 70’s. It shows already some diligent life-signs, sensations and similar repairs. As such the gourd looks impressive. I will aim to maintain this mood. Just regain its spirit. That’s where it’s ever made for…

I started to remove every worn leftover hardware piece and glued all the cracks in the wooden body. There were many! And, even the tabli has completely come loose.

I restored some deco’s and took advantage of the situation to create some extra goodie carved into the celluloïd: an OM sign, in the middle of a simple repetitive circular design …

After that, some body cleaning and leveling has been performed followed by rough color matching. Mahogany as well as gulanagari red have been applied before, so I used it again now. Followed by a thin and fresh new protective shellac finish layer, treated with bee wax to regain it’s aged expression.

Doing jawari & mounting new strings to conclude…

Note: this is a large female size (35inch) tanpura.

Sound sample: Play Benares tanpura

The scale (open string length) of this slim instrument is 90cms and it is tuned to F#.

The string set is
1: 0,41mm bronze string tuned to C#3
2: 0,30mm steel string tuned to F#3
3: 0,30mm steel string tuned to F#3
4: 0,56mm bronze string tuned to F#2

Kartar Chand vintage sitar repair

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In 2009, Hari Chand presented me an old sitar which has been originally made by him and his brother, late Kartar Chand, in the 1970’s. The sitar suffered severely from a loose joint due to “an unfortunate fall from a kitchen table”…, dixit the former owner. How peculiar that no other parts of the instrument were  broken. Since the owner wasn’t interested in this sitar anymore I was the lucky one to receive it.


During the second half of this year I finally found the time to repair and fully restore this instrument. Here are some pictures about the more spectacular part of the process. For this occasion I installed my home-made steam injector again. It has been serving me well in the past (click here), although its use is not always completely without risk. The steam can be very tricky and cause severe burns quickly. But everything went well. As for the joint itself: the wood was split at 2 positions due to an earlier joint adjustment. That’s why I decided to insert a completely new piece of wood.

Now this sitar is completely repaired and carefully renovated, ready to start a new life. It is a very light weight instrument, decorated in a very refined and exquisite way. There are 20 pardas, 12 taravs and a high quality staghorn jawari. The sound is superb, bright and clear, with an incredible tarav response. Well-known qualities for all sitars built by these two excellent craftsmen-brothers!

Kartar Chand sitar restoration

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This early 70’s original Kartar Chand sitar just left the restoration booth. Complete body check-up and new polish has been done by late Kartar’s brother Hari Chand in New Delhi in march 2009 while I was there on a visit. The celluloid mother of pearl imitation parda lanes have been renewed. My part of the job was to refurbish the original pardas and fit them again on the new lanes. I also made and fit new stagghorn jiwaris for main strings and taravs. The original tuning pegs were used again but some taravkuti-holes needed a new bushing.

Note the very fine finger grips on these taravkutis and also the remarkable cherry-round tumba-shape which is very typical on all Kartar Chand’s sitars.

This sitar sounds amazingly bright and has a vivid tarav response. The meends play very easy and the instrument is very light-weighted.

New pardas on Hiren Roy

Sitar Factory Posted on by

This old Hiren Roy sitar, brought to me by Arnoud E. needs new pardas and some small repair work. Arnoud provided a full set of new pardas made by Hiren Roy Company, but some of them were made too short. Thus I decided to reuse a selection of the old pardas and fitted them at the end (the last 4, nearest to jiwari).

Also some body cleaning has been performed and together with new strings and fresh jiwari this sitar is ready for another life… finally almost a complete restoration.