Had a discussion with an American who patented a stable leg in a graphite material with a lubricating surface and extremely low internal loss of energy (www.obbligatoinc.com). A variant of the stable leg was small pieces of the magical material embedded under each string in a wooden stable leg. User reviews of the new stable leg were positive, one thing that stood out was that many thought that the string separation was better.

Thought about it and realized that it was not so much the new material that was interesting but the principle of having small pieces of hard material under the string with a softer wood all around. It is not difficult to imagine that the energy from a string can propagate quickly in the hard material but not as fast in the wood. This gives less "leakage" between the strings and each string sounds more individual in a chord where you strike all the strings at the same time. In theory.

Had to test in practice. First made a thick stable leg in solid bone, 4 mm wide and about 9 mm high. Then a similar one in maple with 4 x 4 mm bone pieces glued under the strings. The solid leg got heavy, so I also tried to lighten it by filing some material between the strings on the underside where it is not visible. The wooden leg still became noticeably lighter.

Tested the two different variants and my first impression is

• With a solid leg, the volume became a little larger and the sound when you hit all the strings became dense and no individual strings can be distinguished in the sound. The sound became more like an evenly thick "porridge".
• With the composite bone, the volume became a little lower, but when you hit all the strings, you could distinguish more details and hear individual strings in the sound. To my taste, it sounds a bit better than with solid legs, more details and sounds like a better instrument!

I think I have found something that will be standard on all GammelGura in the future!

Tomorrow there will be a wild experiment with brass / bone / hard plastic as inserts, different types of wood, with and without sockets at the bottom and different sizes of inserts. But already the first attempt was a success, has probably not been so happy since I tested the saddle intonation for the first time! 🙂