It's not a good idea to situate the hitch pins all in one straight row in the block because they can collectively assume the role of a wedge and split the block. It would be a shame to split our new block; this zither's been there, done that. They should be situated in two or sometimes three rows if there are a lot of them and/or they're crowded. This zither has only 20 wide-spaced strings, so two rows is plenty.

I measured the thickness of the block, and it was just (again, exactly a whisker) over an inch. So I figured if I started at the center point, 1/2", and spaced each row 1/8" from it, the rows would be 1/4" apart and each would be 3/8" inward from the edges of the block's thickness. Those measurements all seemed good, so I made a number of parallel lines on the manila, starting 1/4" from one edge and continuing across the width of the paper. We will call these the "long lines." You'll see in a minute why I made so many.

The distance between the two lines perpendicular to those (which we'll call the "short lines") was the overall distance between the two outermost strings, the measurement we divided by 19. It's a good idea to keep all these lines both as square and as parallel as possible.