Gluing on a fingerboard is not a hard job. One puts glue on the board, places it on the neck, squishes it down, rubs it around a bit until most of the glue is spread or squeezed out, leaving just enough to do the job, and at that point the board sticks in place on its own. It can be scooted around for placement, but it’s not slippery and it will stick when you let go. Then you put on the clamps. On the other hand there’s a school that believes in making easy jobs hard, in this case, by adding metal locating pins. I don’t know of a single person who likes to run into one of these with his knife ..read more

A recent phone call from the respected archtop guitar maker Dan Koentopp reminded me that his work should be interesting to violin makers as well as guitarists. Danny worked in our shop for several years to gain an understanding of arch-topped instruments, then went out on his own. making beautiful guitars. As a result of his experience here you’ll see a lot of violin influence in his archtops, including the straight-from-cello f-holes, and his unique violin-inspired bridges, like the one in the photo below taken from his web site. That’s him on the left in the lead picture above, and me on th ..read more

Note: Sadly, the 2020 SCVMW workshop had to be cancelled due to COVID-19. For the last fifteen years I have  been teaching violin making for several weeks every summer at the Southern California Violin Making Workshop (SCVMW) in sunny Claremont, California. It’s been an amazing experience because of the wonderful friends I have made, the pleasure of watching my students progress, and how much it has helped me consolidate and articulate ideas I have had about violins. Through all that time, the workshop coordination/administration (a gigantic proportion of the work!) has been admirably han ..read more

Hidden inside the top, the bass bar is one of the elegantly sculpted parts of the violin. One day, from curiosity I mapped out how a normal bar, which has a sweeping, scooped look on the contoured violin top, would look if it were on a flat top rather than an arched one, by mapping the heights on a flat line, and was I surprised! It turns out to be a neat triangle with the top lopped off round, and if it went all the way out to the ends including through the top, the very tips of the ends would end right at the ribs. In this drawing the bar is the cross-hatched area. The ribs and linings are f ..read more

While on the topic of the sufferings of rental instruments: When we started a rental program, a friend warned me that I’d regret renting cellos. Here’s one reason why. These babies cost a lot of money, but not enough to justify fixing something like this. I once repaired a fine old English cello that someone had backed a van over, and it wasn’t this bad ..read more

My shop runs a small rental program. There are all sorts of ways to damage an instrument, and I’ve seen them all, I think. This is the bridge on a tiny violin, a 1/32, perhaps. In this case, the bridge was permitted to warp forward by the natural pull of the strings. Then at some point, I think the teacher noticed and pulled the bridge back, perhaps a bit too far. On the really tiny violins I often leave the bridges thick because the violins don’t have any sound, anyway, and a thicker bridge stands a better chance of not warping. You can see how much good that did this time ..read more

No photo for this one–I’m just going to point you over to the first new article I’ve put up on my book site since 2012, an explanation of how I scan archings on violins with my carpenter’s laser. The article is under Chapter 3, here: http://violinmag.com ..read more

I recently showed a violin getting a breast patch. Here’s a shot of that same top, prepared for making a plaster cast. The top has been spot tacked to a sheet of plywood, then a sheet of very thin latex stretched over it to protect it. Next a dam is built around the outside, to contain the plaster. The next step after this photo is to cut a piece of hardware cloth (something that’s a bit like window screen of thicker wire with bigger holes) to the shape of the violin top. Plaster gets mixed and poured over the top. After it starts to thicken a bit, the hardware (wire) cloth is pushed down into ..read more

A few years ago I ran into a 3/4 cello with unusually strange top wood and now recently I’ve run into another, a 4/4. This is also an old Italian cello, of about the same age, and it works fine. Something interesting about both of these cellos is that while we’re taught to think that slab-sawn wood like this is weak and liable to crack (slabbed maple violin backs certainly do this) the tops on both of these cellos were both in unusually good condition for instruments of their age ..read more

Usually tops and backs are just glued directly to the ribs and linings, nothing fancy. At various places and times in the past, though, sometimes makers locked the top and back in place. This is seen in very old French violins and Dutch, also, but usually just as a thin groove slotted into the back or top, the width of the rib thickness, into which the rib is glued. Though this is mostly hidden, there are two nearly invisible clues that a back has the ribs set in. The first is that in spite of their great age, the margins of these backs and tops are usually flawlessly even all around. Where no ..read more