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Help support the MIMForum by supporting our sponsors:

• Stewart-MacDonald Guitar Shop Supply, wood, kits, and supplies for building fretted and bowed instruments.
• Papa's Shoppe, wood and parts for acoustic and electric builders.
• Alaska Specialty Woods, soundboard woods for acoustic instruments.
  
• Duke Of Pearl, shell, Abalam, and exotic inlay materials for luthiers.
• Moll Custom Instruments, builders of fine archtop guitars and basses; solid-body 4, 5, and 6-string electric bases; and violins, violas, cellos, and bows.
• The MIMForum Bookstore, books on musical instrument construction, general woodworking, and acoustical physics.
• Order your woodworking tools and supplies from the MIMForum Tool Store and help support the MIMForum!

For The Builder, Continued Percussion:

• Brent Santin's bodhran-making instructions.
• Jim McGill presents an alternative bodhran rim-making option.
• Bob Denton's El Cheapo Bodhráns. Make your own out of a garden sifter!
• Building a Goblet Drum, a step-by-step description of making a pretty large hand-drum from bandsawed sections of 3/4-inch floor underlayment.
• Chris Bittner's page on Building A Djembe.
• Two downloadable videos on how to make and tune a djembe. The videos are poor quality, but may be useful to a builder.
• Making Your Own Taiko, a Japanese drum. The site advises beginning builders to start off by getting a wine barrel, and going from there. Their homepage includes a run-down of sources of rawhide for heading drums, of use to anyone heading a drum with cowhide.
• How to Make a Macedonian Tupan by David Golber
• Making a simple conga out of plywood.
• Online Calculator for Stave Shell Drum Construction.
• Tabla and Baya Re-heading.
• Nate True's page on building a tuned PVC percussion instrument.
• Pulling Diamonds Flip Book, an odd little set of pages on tying on a drum head.
• How to make a Shekere.
• Handbook for Steel Pan Making and Tuning. This is a complete book, available online as HTML files and in PDF format.
• Making a set of Double Seconds (pans). Lots of pictures, intended for use with the book above, the site isn't complete yet.
• Greg Phillips' wind-chime tuning program. Greg now works making electronic mobility aids for the blind and visually impaired. One of our members says, "Chime is a great little program. I've used it to create wind chimes and to test the sounds of various scales. It comes with many different theoretical and historical scales, and it allows you to specify your own tuning based on cents or wholenumber ratios. The output it uses is a chime-like sample through the sound card, but the tuning accuracy is limited by the sound card. You may also output via the PC speaker which is unpleasant but far more accurate. The user interface is a bit quirky, but once you learn how to work around the bugs it's easy to use. It includes a simple calculator that allows you to calculate the theoretical length of a new tube given the length of the first tube and the frequency of the first. It does not work (no sound output) on my new machine with win98 and the soundblaster 128 card: the problem could be caused by either. --Darren Burgess"
• Online Free-Bar Calculator for determining the length of bars on free-bar instruments like marimbas and xylophones, vibraphones, wind chimes and other tubular chimes, and tubulons (metal-tube marimbas), in order to get the pitches or scale you want.
• Le Tambourin A Cordes, also called Tambour du Béarn or String Drum. Page in French with two pictures and a few dimensions. One of our members says the 6 strings are tuned C g C g C g.
• How to make a timpani stick.

Keyboards:

• The MIMForum Bookstore carries books on woods, tools, general woodworking, and finishing; the MIMForum Tool Store carries general-purpose tools, and your purchases will help support the Forum!
• SAFETY FIRST!! For a real chill, search through Woodworking Central's survey of shop accidents, by tool, for first-person accounts of shop accidents, along with recommendations by the victims on how you can avoid similar incidents. The most common reasons given for injury are inattention, ignoring safety conventions when you know you shouldn't, and trying to rush through a job. Woodworking Central is a website by and for woodworkers. Includes articles, tool reviews, wood scans, and more.
• DON'T GET CARELESS!! Read the article Woodworker Dies When Struck by Tool Knife Launched from Overarm Router.
• First Aid for Adhesion of Skin and Eye Tissue by Cyanoacrylate Adhesives (Superglue).
• Wood dust is a potential health hazard. Here's the rec.woodworking Dust FAQ.
• Cyclone Dust Collector Research, includes an excellent introdution to the hazards of dust in the workshop .
• Toxic woods list, Wood Working Toxic Woods, yet another wood health hazards list.
• The Botanical Dermatology Database.
• A jewelry site that sells wooden jewelry has a very interesting page on wood allergies and what causes them, including a list of woods by common and Latin names detailing the allergenic substances contained in each.
• U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Products Laboratory has made their Wood Handbook available online as several PDF files. Highly technical, but don't let that stop you - you can skip the technical parts and still learn a lot. They have a number of other publications available online
• Figure in Wood, an illustrated technical article: an interesting but rather dry read if you're curious about what causes figure in wood.
• Color-correct pictures of exotic woods, broadband (all the thumbnails), or dial-up (fewer thumbnails, more text), posted by an amateur woodworker of 30 years experience. 479 different woods, 7,745 pictures of those woods at this time. A very useful site, woods are identified by their common names, there are fact sheets included for some woods. Note that how "color correct" the pictures are will depend in part on your monitor quality.
• Identifying Common Northwest Wood Species, the Oregon State University Extension Service woodworker's guide, has been posted as a PDF file.
• The South American hardwoods tree and wood characteristics page isn't specifically aimed at instrument makers, but is still a useful online source of information. It's 415k, and takes a while to download.
• Windsor Plywood's index of exotic woods and index of North American hardwoods.
• Peter Coombe's article on the use of Australian Native Timbers in lutherie.
• A discussion on the MIMForum prompted member Gerry Amos to contribute an Excel spreadsheet on properties of Australian wood species. Also available as two PDF files: Alternative Australian Timbers and Strengths of Australian Timbers.
• Introduction to Wood Identification, which would be a lot more useful if they'd included some pictures of what they're talking about.
• Wood Properties Tech Sheets of North American hardwoods, North American softwoods, tropical woods, and lesser-known woods.
• The Hardwood Information Center's Hardwood Species Guide has information on several common North American hardwoods.
• A list of timbers alphabetically by common name, so you can look up their botanical name and country of origin using the online charts on these pages. In two pages, by common name: A - L and M - Z.
• "Janka" Hardness Table for some domestic and exotic woods may be helpful in choosing an alternative fingerboard wood.
• MatWeb materials information website has a materials properties index online listing properties of polymers/plastics, metals, ceramics, and other materials, including some woods under the "Other Engineering Materials" box at the bottom.
• British/Metric/American thread specification substitution table.
• Fine Woodworking has some woodworking articles online.
• WoodZone Tips, Tricks, and Jigs and Online Articles Index.
• 101 Woodworking Tips & Techniques from Woodsmith, ShopNotes, and Workbench.
• Shopsmith's wood shop tips, about 170 articles on general tool use and woodworking techniques.
• WoodNet shop tips
• ShopNotes article on using a dial indicator in your shop to align and square your tools.
• The Woodworking Times pages on Woodworking 101, and an online Archive of some of their past articles.
• The Badger Pond Archives: general woodworking articles, FAQs, tool reviews, and downloads.
• Joe Woodworker has some general woodworking articles online, including a very detailed article on vacuum clamping.
• Jeff Gorman's pages on hand planing step-by-step, Points About Planing, for those new to the process.
• Author and woodworker Jeff Greef's fascinating webpage on building a Bombe Vitrine, a glass case curved in three dimensions. This well-explained project will be of interest to any builder who makes instruments with an arched top and/or back, especially those making stave-back instruments; or anyone who likes looking at beautiful woodworking. He has an excellent general woodworking links page as well.
• Great woodworking by Livio De Marchi, be sure to check out his gallery of large works. This has nothing to do with instruments but got a big "Wow!" from our members.
• Rick Christopherson's Waterfront Woods website, dedicated to providing information to woodworkers about woodworking related issues. Several articles on woodworking and other subjects including instructions for building a phase converter, and a comprehensive discussion of electrical issues for woodworkers.
• An article briefly explaining humidity, temperature, and wood moisture content; and a more extensive article on wood and moisture relationships, the latter in PDF format.
• Two USDA publications in PDF format, on Air Drying Lumber and Drying Hardwood Lumber, both by the Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, WI. Long, thorough, detailed.
• Kip Yeager's Introduction to Solar Kilns.
• Processing Trees to Lumber for the Hobbyist and Small Business, includes simple plans for a solar kiln.
• The Woodworker's Internet Directory, an online searchable database of woodworking-related websites.

• An online searchable index of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS).
• Homestead Finishing's Sandpaper Grit Comparison Chart.
• French Polishing (Anyone Can Do It), an excellent, comprehensive treatment by guitar builders Bob and Orville Milburn.
• Another article on French polishing by a guitar builder; and a French Polishing Essay.
• A MIMForum member alerted us to this book made available online through Project Gutenberg: French Polishing and Enamelling by Richard Bitmead. We're not sure how useful this book, first published in 1910, may be - some of the terms for ingredients may be archaic, leading to confusion if you want to try recipes.
• If you want to make your French polish out of entirely non-toxic materials but you're having trouble finding pure ethanol, InternetWines.com sells Everclear 190 Proof Grain Alcohol. They can *NOT* ship to Pennsylvania, Washington, Oregon, or California.
• Choosing And Applying a Traditional Shellac Finish and Padding Shellac by Jeff Jewitt.
• Shellac Information and FAQ.
• More than you ever wanted to know about shellac.
• Violin maker Leif Luscombe's varnish glossary and two varnish recipes.
• Chuck DeHart's article on Finishing Your Musical Instrument With Tru Gun Oil (Tru Oil).
• Fine Woodworking's online video on finishing with Tried & True Varnish Oil, a product similar to Tru Oil.
• Mike Doolin's article on Waterborne Finishing with Grafted Coatings "KTM-9".
• A reprint of an article from the May/June 1987 issue Fine Woorworking on Protecting Wood from Humidity, a comparison of the effectiveness of various finishes on keeping water vapor out of wood. A little vague for our purposes as it doesn't tell us how thick the finish films are in their tests, but still useful. In PDF format.
• The Guitar Reranch has several articles on finishing (mostly electric) guitars, including Refinishing 101 (The Basics).
• Jeff Jewitt's finishing articles.
• Michael Dresdner's finishing articles and finishing FAQ.
• Not all masking tapes are created equal. Here's a run-down of the different types of masking tapes, the link was posted in a discussion about the best way to mask a faux binding. For that and other finishes that need to be masked, you want to use the blue safe-release tape. If your local hardware store doesn't carry it, an auto parts supply store might.
• Trying to accurately reproduce the color of an old electric? AutoColorLibrary.com has color swatches online, and claims they can reproduce any car color from any year.
• Some of our members are interested in swirl-painting their solidbody guitars like Fender did with some Strats. Here's an article on How to Swirl-Paint, and another on marbeling paper which may also be of some use. The first article is more comprehensive.
• A page on painting mediums that might be of use to someone cooking up a custom finish.

• The Old Woodworking Machines Website has a large number of reprinted tool manuals available online, organized by manufacturer. Very useful if you're looking for part numbers and exploded diagrams and the like for your vintage power tool.
• Hand-tool junkies will enjoy this woodworker porn: The Peerless Tool Chest of H. O. Studley, a 19th century tool chest built by Massachusetts piano maker Henry Studley stuffed with about 300 hand tools! A gorgeous work of art, well worth a look.
• Many instrument makers want to photograph their own instruments instead of hiring a pro to shoot them. Here are some online photography lessons that may improve your output.
• Safe tool use is often a topic of discusson on the MIMForum, and there's been a great deal of interest in the SawStop, a tablesaw with a built-in system to recognize flesh, and stop the saw blade in approximately 5 milliseconds if it cuts into yours. Woodworker Dave Wright has posted his impressions of the SawStop he bought in this discussion on the Saw Mill Creek woodworking forum. Note that the saw will only work with a nominal 10" blade or an 8" dado set, although there is actually a range of something like +/- .5 around the nominal that can be adjusted for if necessary.
• MIMForum member Chris Franklin has posted some reviews of freeware and low-cost shareware CAD programs.
• FastCad's View32, a freeware DXF viewer that will print out a DXF file as tiled pages from your home/office printer.
• Shareware program pdfFactory allows you to create PDF files. Our users have found it very useful for turning DXF files into PDF files, which appear to print with great accuracy and don't require any special drivers.
• Freeware/shareware program Easy DWG/DXF to Image Converter allows you to batch-convert DWG/DXF files to JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, and other file formats. If you don't pay for the program you're limited to converting three images per batch, but you can convert as many single images or small batches as you want.
• Fine Woodworking has posted a review of 10 heavy-duty tablesaws including Delta, Jet, Grizzly, and Powermatic. Useful if you're in shopping mode.
• MIMForum member and luthier Bill Machrone has posted a review of the DeWalt 621 Router, with guitar-making in mind.
• MIMForum member Andy Bryson recommends Convert, a freeware conversion program that converts many common Imperial and decimal units including length, angle, flow, density, volume, speed, etc. It also allows the user to enter custom conversion units.
• Convert all kinds of units from Metric to Imperial or back at this website, which includes a support forum.
• Convert fractional inches to mm online.
• A chart of Drill Tap Sizes.
• Graph Paper Printer, a shareware program for printing your own graph papers, music manuscripts, and pattern papers, with user-defined sizes and colors. A number of our members have found it very useful.
• How To Calibrate your Hygrometer.
• Ron Hock's Sharpening Notes. A master's instructions on tool sharpening.
• A Guide to Honing and Sharpening.
• The D&S Scary Sharp(TM) System, a very amusing instructional page on using sandpaper for honing, a technique with a lot of adherents.
• Discussions on building your own thickness sander outnumber all other DIY tool discussions on the MIMForum, put together. Here's a set of online plans.
• Building A Home Made Belt Sander.
• Dollmaker George F. Farrell has written an article on Building a Woodturning Lathe.
• A pole lathe page, including a simple set of plans and instructions for building one.
• Building a poleless pole lathe, including simple plans.
• Make Your Own Cam Clamps, includes templates.
• Popular Mechanic's article on Building an Overarm Pin Router. Very complete, illustrated with photographs and including a materials list.
• Make Your Own Wooden Hand Plane, step-by-step online instructions by David Welter.
• How to make a bow saw, in PDF format.
• How to make a frame saw, and once you've made it, how to use your frame saw.
• How to make a spokeshave and how to tune a spokeshave.
• Make a shooting board. Includes plans.
• Ralph Brendler's Hand Scraper Page and Handsaw FAQ.
• The Brazing Book, an illustrated online book.
• Another online book, in PDF format, this one is Band and Frame Sawdoctoring, a very thorough look at maintaining and welding bandsaw blades. Intended for the forestry industry, but if you're interested in cleaning, sharpening, and/or welding your own blades, you might find this useful.
• Here's a much shorter page on welding bandsaw blades, intended for the small shop.
• Cleaning Rusty Tools by means of electrolysis, as a simple back-yard project requiring little more than a battery charger, a plastic tub, and some scrap metal.
• Many of our members are interested in DIY CNC. Here's a low budget and home built CNC site, and a list of websites devoted in part to home CNC.
• The CAD CAM EDM DRO Home Page, the CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO Yahoo group, and and a list of CAD CAM EDM DRO files hosted by that Yahoo group.
• Siemens Energy & Automation, Inc., has put a number of self-study courses online. These courses cover Basics of Electricity, Power Distribution, and Industrial Motors and Control Products.
• John Swensen's Guide to Machine Optimization: making and improving computing and woodworking machinery and accessories. A number of well-written, entertaining and informative articles.
• Electrical Wiring FAQ.
• Fundamentals of Machine Tools, a US Army online book, in PDF format.
• The Model Engineer Support Page with lots of information on maintaining and making your own (metalworking) tools and lathe attachments. Use the links under the "Workshop" heading in the left frame. Anyone with a lathe should visit this website!
• This fascinating MetalWorking GearHeads site includes step-by-step instructions for making your own metal turning lathe, casting aluminum parts using green sand casting.
• Metalworking FAQ/Compendium.
• Metal Web News, a graphical on-line guide to metalworking. Includes a good article on building a phase converter. Also includes
• The Selection, Connection, Reversing and Repair of Electric Motors, and article that has been of interest to several of our members.
• The Machinist Home Page.
• A Lot Of Brass, an individual's homepage on making your own tools. Includes plans for making a bench shaper/horizontal milling machine, belt sander, collet chuck, surface grinder, and more.
• The U.S. Army's Fundamentals Of Machine Tools training circular has been published online. Each chapter is available as a PDF file -- use the "Download Document" link at the top left of every page.

• Accordion Links Page.
• The Autoharp Page, brought to you by the CyberPluckers Autoharp Society.
• Bagpipe Web Directory.
• The Bagpipes go to the Movies, one of the most worthless sites on the Web. Great fun!
• Manuel Carro's gaita homepage, with lots of information about the Galician bagpipe of Spain, including a page on reed dimensions and care.
• ezFolk.com has online tutorials on playing bluegrass banjo, clawhammer banjo, and folk guitar, all oriented towards beginners. They also have a large folk music links resource.
• Bodhrán homepage.
• Les instruments à bourdons French-language site devoted mostly to instruments with drones (bourdons): bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies, and musettes (and diatonic accordions). The "photo gallery" pages are very impressive -- take a look at this hurdy-gurdy with acoustic amplifying horn.
• Brass Instruments Resources, a massive links page. This seems to be another version of the same page.
• Han's Irish Bouzouki Homepage.
• Cittern Page examines the differences between mandolins, citterns, mandolas, bouzoukis, etc. Includes information on scale lengths and tunings.
• So Just What Exactly Is A Cittern, Anyway? by Robin Bullock, another attempt to define the diferences between the various instruments of the mandolin family.
• Concertina FAQ.
• The Crumhorn page.
• Didjeridoo site.
• Circular Breathing how-to, in English and Italian, so you can play your didj!
• Bob Gollihur's extensive Double Bass Links Page.
• Hammered and Mountain Dulcimer Links.
• The "Official" Hammered Dulcimer Page.
• David Kettlewell's 1976 doctoral thesis "The Dulcimer," the most complete reference work on the hammered dulcimer ever written, is gradually being posted online.
• Links page of the Center for the Study of Free-Reed Instruments.
• Glass Instruments of all kinds.
• The Fender Discussion Page, for all things Fender.
• Harmony Central, a website devoted to guitar, bass, and related equipment.
• GuitarSite.com, tons of links.
  
• GuitarZone, devoted to guitar playing.
• Tom Loredo's Acoustic Guitarists' Annotated Guide to the Internet has a worthwhile Acoustic Guitar Resources page.
• Ron Long's alphabetical Guitar Makers and Repairers.
  
• Luthiers Around the World (regional), brought to you by Famous Guitarmakers Internet Headquarters.
  
• Guitar Gallery of Houston links.
  
• Guitar Notes, very complete and well-organized.
• Notecannons, presenting a graphic pictorial history of the National brand name, dating from the 1920s through to the present day.
• Brad's Page of Steel, devoted to the lap steel guitar.
• The World's Smallest Guitar, 10 microns long with strings 100 atoms wide.
• And The World's Biggest Guitar, 30' 9" long, over 2,500 lbs.
• Henry Houh's Harp Page with loads of links. This page has not been updated since 9/98, and will be dropped from our listing the middle of 2000 if it is not updated by then. Henry is a chocoholic -- don't miss his chocolate truffle recipes!
• Harp Links, and more Harp Links.
• Harp Care Hints and 911 Harp.
• Hurdy Gurdy page.
• Mando Mark's Mondo Mando site has a Mandolinks page. Mandolin Players Unite!
• The Mandolin Cafe has a worthy links page. Grab a table and order a beverage.
  
• The Pan Page. Site for the Steel Pan Community.
• The Pipers Guild is dedicated to the threefold craft of making, playing and decorating bamboo pipes. The bamboo pipe is a simple hand-made wind instrument, similar to a recorder but with a gentler tone. Their links page is mostly bamboo and recorder-related.
• The Recorder Home Page.
• Recorders and flutes manufactured and/or adapted for one-handed play.
  Although we ordinarily avoid posting links to commercial pages, we find the two companies below worthy of special mention. You can use the International Currency Converter to figure costs in your local currency.
  • Dolmetsch (UK) offers their Gold Series Recorders for players who can use only one hand. Descant and treble models with four keys are available for either left-handed or right-handed play in pearwood, boxwood, and rosewood. Unfortunately these (rather expensive) recorders are only available by direct order from the UK, and are not distributed in the US or Canada.
  • Mollenhauer (Germany) manufactures recorders for one-handed play. They also make and modify flutes for one-handed play from any manufacturer: that German-language page includes many photos of adaptive equipment for their flutes and recorders. There is no English-language page on their modified flutes. Mollenhauer has a German-language links page, to mostly English-language recorder and flute sites.
• Reed Organ Homepage
• The International Saxophone Homepage.
• The Serpent Website (no, it's not about snakes).
• The Theremin home page, the only instrument that you play without touching it.
• King Tut's Trumpet, a downloadable freeware Windows 3.1/95/NT program that "contains a truly unique recording of the original silver trumpet from the tomb of the Ancient Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamun, who lived in the 14th century B.C." The recording is 15 seconds long. It also has two pictures of the silver trumpet from King Tut's tomb, descriptions and measurements, and a bit of history/background on trumpets of the era.
• Fiddle Magazine's fiddle links.
• Joel Glassman's 4-page article on Amplifying Your Violin.
• The Bowed Electricity website, devoted to electric violin players, makers, and resources.
• Zithers.com.
• OddMusic.com has a gallery of some common and many unusual acoustic and electric instruments. All are pictured and there most include a sound sample.

• The Internet Archive houses an audio archive that contains thousands of public domain MP3 files. Included in the open source section are a number of recording from the 1920s and '30s by such seminal American artists as Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, The Carter Family, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Blind Willie Johnson, Ma Rainey, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Michael Coleman, Mississippi John Hurt, and more. Or start here to browse through all 2,702 recordings currently in that section (the good stuff is mostly on the first few pages). This is a real treasure-trove, especially for those of you who have never been exposed to this music and enjoyed the soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou." Also check out this rather amazing video (if you have broadband).
• The National Park Service archive at the Edison National Historic Site includes approximately 48,000 disc and cylinder records produced by Edison in West Orange, New Jersey, between 1888 and 1929. A few of these very early recordings have been made available online as MP3 files.
• Free Music Graphics, music-related clip-art and backgrounds you can use to dress up your music-related website.
• Chuck Boody's enormous Music Sites links page.
• Tom Keays has a well-ordered instruments links page.
• Jian-Hui Zhuang's bilingual (English and Mandarin) Music of Cyberworld links pages, weighted somewhat towards education. Very big, use the links on the bottom of every page to surf through it.
• Eric Mrozek's Music Links page.
• The Blue Flame Cafe, an interactive biographical encyclopedia of great blues artists.
• Also for blues fans, here's Jason Taylor's terrific Cookie Blues, a fanciful 6 meg animation that's a "must view" for any blues aficionado. Well worth the time to download!
• Ceolas. The largest collection of Celtic music online with hundreds of links to other sites.
• A French-language dictionary of folk resources, with a page of instrument links. Tout ce que vous voulez savoir sur le Folk en Europe, consultez Le Jargon Du P'tit Folkleux, avec une liste des instruments.
• Finnish lute maker Arto Wikla lists many early music links.
• The Galpin Society is mainly into early instruments.
  
• The Medieval Music & Arts Foundation's Early Instrument Resources.
• 120 Years of Electronic Music, an on-line encyclopedia of electronic instruments.
• Ethnomusicology OnLine, a peer-reviewed multimedia Web journal.
• Festival Finder. Find a music (of any kind) festival near you in the US or Canada.
• Folk Festivals in the United States and Canada.
• The Fiddler's Companion, and TuneIndex search, two searchable indexes (by complete or partial title) of over 50,000 fiddle tunes from the Celtic, British and American traditions. The former includes several hundred "abc" files, the latter does not include any form of downloadable tune files. Information on tune variants, alternate names, dances used with the tune, and published sources for the music.
• The Session, a tunes website with sheet music, "abc" files, discography, and information about Irish tunes and tunes from other countries played by Irish performers.
• Richard Robinson's Tunebook, a searchable collection of traditional and contemporary folk tunes from many countries and cultures, all downloadable as 'abc' files.
• Folk Music Index - a searchable index to recorded resources by music title keyword, performer, or composer name.
• The searchable index (by word or phrase) of the Digital Tradition Folk Song Database. An impressive collection! The site includes an interactive forum for discussing songs and finding lyrics.
• Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music Project, which provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces of sheet music published in America between 1850 and 1920. A wonderful resource!! They also have a list of other sheet music collections.
• Folk Music Homepage. Lots of links to anything relating to folk music.
  
• Glossary of Musical Terms.
• Browse the Library of Congress site for some great research tools. Traditional music enthusiasts should check the American Folklife Center page, and especially the listing of reissued folk music albums available on CD, including the new CD "A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings" which includes the classic 1942 recording of Bozie Sturdavent and the congregation of the Silent Grove Baptist Church singing "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," believed by many to be one of the most important American field recordings in the LOC archives. This album is only for the hard-core traditionalist!
• The Library of Congress has recently posted an online presentation of the John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip, a multiformat ethnographic field collection that includes nearly 700 sound recordings, as well as fieldnotes, dust jackets, and other manuscripts documenting a three-month, 6,502-mile trip through the southern United States. If you don't know who John Lomax is, you can't call yourself a folkie! This is a website worth spending some time investigating!!
• Two chapters of the book "Music: A User's Guide for the Beginner" by Gary Daum have been posted online that might be of interest to builders: Acoustics and Acoustical Properties of Common Instruments. A good introduction to both subjects.
• The Musée des arts et métiers has several pages devoted to mechanical instruments. Their webpages are available in English, French, and German.
• A page of links to Mechanical Music Sites on the Internet.
• Mugwumps Online has a jumplist to lots of resources.
  
• The Music Heritage Network Musical Instrument Encyclopedia. Not very easy to navigate if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, but still useful.
• Musica Antiqua has a very cool Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Instruments, annotated with pictures and sound samples; as well as a page of Early Music Resources on the Web.
• The homepage of NEFFA, the New England Folk Festival Association, which hosts the Northeast's premier festival of traditional and folk music and dance every April in Natick, Mass. They have a terrific and well-organized links resource as well.
• Scandinavian Folk Music Homepage courtesy of the Folkmusiccafé of Gothenburg, in Swedish and English.
• The Sibelius Academy Music Resources Page, voted a PC Magazine Top 100 Web Site. See their Instruments Page too. They appear to have stopped updating their links.
• The Smithsonian's Musical History FAQs and Links, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and Radio Smithsonian pages.
• Rencontres Internationales de Luthiers et Maîtres Sonneurs in Saint Chartier (France), in English and French.
• Technical Essays from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Division of the Arts on various aspects of music and sound propagation, written in very understandable language with plenty of helpful illustrations. A bit over-simplified, but a good introduction to the topics they cover.
• The homepage for Traditional Music in France, in French and (eventually) in English.
• The William and Gayle Cook Music Library of Indiana University School of Music list of Worldwide Internet Music Resources.
• If you aspire to be a One-Person Band you should have a look at this website.

• We are proud to say that the MIMForum raised over $20,000 for tsunami and hurricane relief in 2005. In our quest to find organizations worthy of our donations we used Give.org and ChatityNavigator.org, of which the latter was more useful with hurricane relief organizations as it lists more small local charities, and rates them. We donated our money to a variety of charities, and used some of it to fund a trip to New Orleans by a crew of carpenters to help rebuild one home in cooperation with the New Orleans Musicians Clinic. We were able to put the NOMC in touch with Direct Relief International, which then awarded the NOMC a grant to pay the salary for one nurse practitioner. The MIMF/NOMC home rebuilding project received help from The Home Depot in the form of a $3,000 Home Depot Community Impact Grant, for which we thank them.
• By now we've all learned that we need to practice safe computing, or see our PCs overrun with scumware installed without our permission to spy on us and steal our personal information. CWShredder is still by far the best tool out there to remove Cool Web Search (CWS) if that's your problem. The following programs have all been found to work well by our members, we recommend you run at least two regularly, all three would be better.
  SpyBot Search & Destroy (freeware)
  Ad Aware (freeware)
  Spy Sweeper
• Stay up-to-date on the latest Viruses and Virus Hoaxes.
• Tucows, the best site on the net for web-related freeware and shareware.
• The "Editor's Picks" Shareware page at Ziff Davis. Lots of freeware/shareware you can download from this site, constantly updated, with ratings and information on how many downloads there have been so you can compare the relative value and popularity of similar programs.
• Your hobby can surprise you by growing into a business almost overnight. Making Money The Old Fashioned Way is a long online article by Joe Martin, founder of Sherline Products, on starting and running a successful business.
• If you're new to the Web, this excellent HTML Primer will introduce you to writing simple HTML to produce your own web pages.
• Another Intro to HTML.
• Special Characters, a list of the escape codes you need for placing special characters in your web pages.
• Confused about copyright issues? Read Brad Templeton's 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.
• How to be a Web Whore Just Like Me is not an adult website, but a fascinating, funny, and rather depressing look at what author Philip Greenspun went through in the process of writing and publishing a book about Web publishing. A website you'll want to spend some reading.
• Want to buy something over the Web but don't know current exchange rates between the ducat and "US dead Presidents" (or whatever)? Try the International Currency Converter.
• Interested in giving instead of buying? The © PEP National Directory of Computer Recycling Programs is a directory of state, national and international agencies that facilitate donations of used computer hardware for schools and community groups. Keep in mind that the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 gives special tax breaks to companies that donate computers less than two years old to schools.
• PubMed, the National Library of Medicine, with access to online articles from internationally recognized medical and scientific journals.
• Clock repair has come up a couple of times on the MIMForum. Check out National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, and S. LaRose, Inc.
• How far is it? Find out the distance from here to there.
• The Department of Zoology at the University of Bergen, Norway, has put three books by Charles Darwin online: "The Origin of Species," "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex," and "The Voyage of the Beagle."
• SpaceWeather.com. See what's up in space! Includes near-realtime monitoring of solar activity, with reports on sunspots, solar flares, and aurora activity. A must-monitor site for those skywatchers in the mid-northern or mid-southern latitudes where aurora are rare but do occur. Subscribe to get e-mail reports when geomagnetic activity is high and auroras most likely.
• Sky & Telescope Magazine has a Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance mailing list (scroll down to the bottom of that page to subscribe). Great for amateur and back-porch star gazers.
• NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. A nice addition to your daily internet routine.
• Atmospheric Optics is a website devoted to exploring and explaining visual phenomena caused by water droplets and ice crystals in the air, like sun and moon halos, sundogs, and rainbows. There are some wonderful pictures of rare halos and unusual clouds. A very enjoyable site, it will make you more aware of the potential for spotting unusual atmospheric optics in your locale.
• The Earth At Night, a composit image from space showing the lights of Earth. This popular link has been posted in discussions on the MIMForum several times. Here's the Astronomy Picture of the Day story that goes with it.
• Hubble Space Telescope Picture Gallery. Go to their wallpaper page to dress up your PC screen.
• The American Stirling Company is a website devoted to the Stirling engine. This came up in a discussion on the MIMForum about how to make a perpetual motion rain stick out of a hula-hoop, of all things. It's a fascinating website for teachers and anyone with an inquiring mind. Read about How Stirling Engines Work.
• The totally cool Terra-server site will show you what your portion of the world looks like from a satellite in space!
• Practical Language Guide for musicians traveling in Finland (scroll down), so you can learn such phrases as "First violins a bit louder, thank you!" in Finnish.
• The Mojave Phone Booth Website, one individual's entertaining obsession with a phone booth in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Why are we including this link here? Because the "Mr. N." who sparked this lunatic's interest in the Mojave phone booth was none other than Nick von Robison, the late co-founder of the MIMForum.
• Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?
• Gary Daum's entertaining webpage on predictions worth remembering.
• Our members really like these two online miniature golf games, Mini-putt and Mini-putt2.
• Are you an idiot? Any more than ten seconds with this and you'll have to make your own assessment ;-)

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