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If you encounter cracks

 

at any stage of the making process, just do like Bruce Rogers did on his famous Didgermaking-Workshops with the logs of students that faced this problem (it happened to two out of six students as an average):
Keep working with the spoke-shave until you´re done with this step of the work, and leave the fixing part for later.

After the rough work and after the start of the sanding process with 40 grain sandpaper, cracks were fixed with super-glue and instantly sanded over with 80 grain sandpaper with the superglue still wet.

Thus, the sanding dust fills in the crack, and mixes with the super-glue. Looks good, and is functional.

If you finished your Didgeridoo and some time later find a crack, have a look » at this tutorial, that will help you to fix it (German explanation only, but you´ll get the idea).


Holes in the raw logs


  If your raw log looks like somebody has drilled a 6 mm hole into it, it is because somebody has drilled a 6 mm hole into it.

Mad Matt´s partners in Australia do exactly this to check the standing, living tree. To find out if it is eaten out by termites - hollow enough to make a great Didgeridoo. If it isn´t, the tree will not be chopped.


Thus those holes are not a fault - but significant criteria for good quality and the care for nature in the log-hunting process. You even find them with top knotch Didgeridoos from most renowned Didgeridoo-makers like BRuce Rogers and others.

With the shipment of your ordered raw log, Mad Matt sends you some standard 6 mm wood-pegs. Before you start the sanding with 80 mm grain, you fit the peg into the hole and glue it with wood-glue or super-glue.

A thorough cleaning of the inside

 

increases the sound quality by a vast margin. Pure timber is what you want on the inside of your Didgeridoo, without any sandy spots and crevaces that muffle the sound quite a bit.

To clean a log from the inside, Mad Matt uses handy tools to push the worst part of the dirt out of the log bit by bit. Once that´s done, he uses a special Karcher pipe-cleaner to clean out the leftovers with water under high pressure. Takes about an half to 3/4 of an hour for an experianced worker, but hey, the tools are there and the enjoyment of the outcome is the icing on the cake.

Have a look at the pic on the left, that´s what was left over when Mad Matt has finished cleaning two logs.


You can have the raw log "as cut" with all that Termite-shit in it, and clean it out yourself,

or you can order it thorougly cleaned out by Mad Matt for 29 bucks extra, save some extra expenses on tools and a fair bit of hampering around and concentrate on the real Didge-making work.  

Thanks for reading this

By doing so you already showed a serious bit of good-will to understand the what´s abouts of the didgemaking, and
Mad Matt hopes he could show you a bit of an insight into the workaday life of a didgemaker as well as give you some information he found during his 20 years + of playing, buying and making Didgeridoos.

That´s, what it´s like, love it or leave it :-)

Bruce Rogers said: "We are here to make the absolute best instrument from this log today."
Go for it !


25 Jahre Mad Matt