As the 1950s were ending, Wolfgang Zuckermann, a piano technician and self-taught harpsichord builder, found himself so busy making service calls from his West Village workshop to adjust his customers’ harpsichords that he had little time for anything else.

“Realizing that most people approach a harpsichord with caution, the way they do a vicious dog,” Mr. Zuckermann wrote in his book “The Modern Harpsichord” (1969), “I decided that the only way they might lose their fear of harpsichord maintenance was to go through the process of building the instrument for themselves.”

His ingenious and influential solution was a low-cost do-it-yourself harpsichord kit, widely referred to as the Z-Box: a 35-pound box containing a keyboard, strings, plectrums (or pluckers), jacks (plectrum-holders) and tuning pins, but not the wood for the cabinet. Customers had to visit a lumber yard for that.

Thousands of people around the world — high school students, retirees, Broadway actors, Wall Street lawyers, nuns, organists, doctors — bought Mr. Zuckermann’s kits, allowing them to play music written for the harpsichord the way it was meant to be played, rather than settling for a piano.