Music stand

I’ve made 2 of these, one of them I traded for some music lessons with my music teacher and the other I kept for myself for practising the violin. It’s adjustable from 76cm ( 30 in) to 140cm ( 55 in) so can be used as a lectern or for playing violin standing up. It can be completely dissassembled and placed in a carrying bag for transporting to gigs or for easy shipment.

I have to admit that I borrowed the idea from somewhere else but the interpretation is my own as I had no measured drawings. My music teacher preferred a solid wood sheet music holder as he likes to write things in the exercise book as he teaches and wanted a solid back. The addition of a pencil holder would have been a welcome accessory in retrospect.

The first one shown is made of New Zealand Rimu ( Dacrydium Cupressinum ) and NZ Hard Beech ( Nothofagus Truncata ). Both are now only sustainably harvested. Rimu is particularly hard to get now, though it is obtainable as recycled timber as almost all house framing used to be rimu in NZ ( thankfully not anymore ). Both woods are extremely fine grained ( about 1mm growth rings or about 25 years to the inch! ) and finish super smooth and wonderful to the touch.

The second one ( which now belongs to my music teacher ) is a mix of recycled rimu, Macrocarpa feet ( Cupressus Macrocarpa) and the top is recycled Kauri ( Agathis Australis ). The Macrocarpa is non-native (originally from California) but is grown commonly here as farm shelter. It’s a cypress, so it extremely weather resistant and has a lovely aroma when cut open. The Kauri grows mainly on the North Island and is another tragedy of colonialisation and is also mainly only available now as recycled timber as it takes several hundred years for it to grow to a decent size.

The mechanism for holding the post is my own design and consists of a threaded knob screwed into a threaded brass insert bearing on a square block which holds the post by friction. There is a small magnet attached to the block so that when the thread is backed out, the block releases the post.

-- Steve, New Zealand, www.steveracz.com