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Violin Making: Setting the Bass Bar in Fiona
One of the mysterious steps in violin making is setting the bass bar. There is much discussion about the bar tension, placement, and thickness; all factors that affect the tone of the final instrument. Also all factors that can not …
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Violin making: Rib Assembly on Fiona
The first steps in making Violin #6, Fiona is building the violin rib assembly. To get started we set the corner gluing blocks to the form and then gluing the ribs. It all sounds pretty simple until, like most things, …
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The Making Violin #6, Fiona Started today
Sound Testing #5 Edward With #5, Edward, playable in the white, I did a set of recordings for comparison to when Edward will have his varnish on. The recordings consist of a set of open string bowings; G, D, A, …
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Edward #5 Setup to Play his first tunes
Today Edward, Violiln #5, was setup and played in the white. Edward was started in February of 2014. When I went to the Tuscon violin making workshop, Edward’s ribs were done and the plate edges were trimmed. Today setup was …
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Today I played a completed Howery Violin!!!
Finally after several years of study, 2 workshops, months of trail and error varnishing; I’ve finished Diana #4. She is varnished, setup, and played!!! Claude #3 will be completed later this week. I wasn’t content with the color and stripped …
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Claude getting some color
After many false starts and learning many new things about color theory, oil painting, glazing, etc etc my violins are starting to look like violins. …
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Varnishing Beatrice
Finally at the stage of varnishing my early violins. The following photos show the varnishing stages of Beatrice my second violin. This photo shows Beatrice with two coats of cold rolled linseed oil. I actually use the food grade fax …
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Day Ten of Violin Making Workshop
Today is that point where we cut holes in the front of the violin plate which we just spent 4 days making contoured, inlaid, smoothed, and very thin. We are going to draw intricately curved lines, drill four holes in …
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Day Eight of the Violin Making Workshop
Days 7&8 were spent shaping the outer curves of the top and bottom plates. With the purfling done, the height of the outer edges is set. The purfling line will be gouged down with a small gouge (approx 6mm) and …
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Day Three of the Violin Making Workshop
Three days of learning and building. We started by making a model template out of aluminum, transfering that to a plywood mold, making and gluing top, bottom, and corner blocks, thinning the side pieces, bending and gluing the side …