John:
Thanks for the mention.
I, too, thought that they looked more like zither-guitars than harp-guitars when I first saw them in the 'Dangerous Curves' exhibition at the Museum on Fine Arts in Boston years ago, and I started thinking about how you could make a 'true' harp guitar then. Finally, between the lack of orders due to the recession, and the '$100 Challenge' on the MIMForum a couple of years ago, I took the plunge. It came out OK.
I'll note right off that the only way to get one like that for less than $100 is to build it yourself, and not pay yourself for the time! Even then, the way it's set up in the pictures it would cost a lot more that $100: it orginally had the cheapest possible tuners on the guitar head, and autoharp pins for the sub-bases instead of the banjo 5th string tuners in the pic. The B&S wood is padauk that I got for $5 a board foot and re-sawed myself, and the soundboard wood was some reject stock Martin gave to Carleen Hutchins back in the '70s, and I inherited on her passing.
One problem with 'real' harps is that they _hate_ steel strings! I think it has to do with the very high pitched, and fairly powerful, longitudinal waves (the 'zip tone') in steel strings, that is communicated to the soundboard because of the way they pull on it. Rather than spend a lot of time messing with brass or bronze sub-bases, I took the path of least resistance and used wound nylon. They sound good, but have a different timbre than the steel strings on the guitar, so the experiment was not a total success in that respect.
Structurally it worked out great. It's also definitely ''different'; almost as individual as some of Fred Carlson's stuff. Since he's one of my lutherie heros, I'm happy to be in the company.
A number of features were dictated by wood size: I didn't have anything long enough (for either of the two HGs) to wrap all the way from the tail of the guitar to the top of the harp. The 'two chamber' effect was serendipitous, but welcome, and I think I'm stuck with the arm bevel of Ken's HG for the rest of my life: everybody likes it too much.
Anyway, I really enjoyed making that 'true' harp guitar, and enjoyed playing it 'way too much. That's one reason I sold it to Greg Miner for the museum: I wasn't getting any work done! At some point, in my copious free time, I'm going to make another the same way, that will be a little less of a kludge as a design, and use nylon strings on the guitar for better tonal balance.
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