Restorations

The instrument was played at a concert at the Nordiska museet in 1927, restored by instrument maker J.C. Bergström. A new restoration was made in 1968 by Mats Arvidsson. He repaired wooden parts, repaired and adjusted the action and removed screws through the curved side into the hitch pin rail. The black paint was missing under the screw heads, and his interpretation was that the paint was not original, so it was removed. The paint was also removed from the stand, but not from the lid. The thick strings were changed to thinner, the plectrum material was changed to delrin.

According to the Academy all strings should have the same thickness, and probably the one chosen was a thickness normally used for strings in the middle of the compass, meaning that the tension in the treble would have been very high. With iron strings 0,30 mm thick and a pitch a semitone lower than modern pitch the tension of the three 8-foot strings in the highest octave is 249 kp, and to this should be added 21 kp for the 4-foot strings, going through holes in the 8-foot bridge and hitched to the hitch pin rail. This can be compared to 90 kp in the harpsichord by Philipp Jacob Specken from 1748 (N42892). Perhaps the screws were introduced already by Broman before the harpsichord was painted, as a result of the high tension. The sound of this peculiar stringing must soon have lead to a new stringing, with more normal sizes.