You may be wondering why a (sub)website devoted to selling tuning wrenches for musical instruments is named "Archimedes' Workshop." You may also be wondering at the curious black and white picture in the upper left-hand area of your screen.

Well, quite simply, a tuning wrench is a lever. And although Archimedes didn't actually invent the lever, he is known to have worked and experimented with them extensively, and has been famously quoted as saying:

(In case you hadn't noticed it already, that mythological logo up in the corner is supposed to be Archimedes using a lever to move the Earth.)

What he means in the quote above is that it's all about leverage, and if given a sufficiently long and sturdy lever, one can accomplish seemingly impossible tasks.

While I certainly don't intend to move the Earth, or even anything close to that difficult, I do intend to apply Archimedes' simple principle about leverage to the tuning of musical instruments. 

In the past, whenever it came time to tune one of my bowed psalteries, I noticed that even when using the longest of the commercially available tuning wrenches, I was still having trouble getting the strings tuned accurately. It was then that I looked down and noticed the ferrule on my tuning wrench coming loose, and instead of trying to fix it, I thought, "hey, why don't I make an entirely new handle: one long enough to suit my needs..." And so, it was with this "wrenching discovery" that the tuning wrenches featured on this website had their beginnings.