“Thicknessing” the Ribs

I wouldn’t have ever thought that “thicknessing” was really a word… but I’ve run across it several times now in books and online articles when referring to planing or scraping wood so that it’s a specific thickness.  So I’ll just go with it.  ;)

The goal was to take the rib pieces from their original thickness (around 1.8mm) down to as close to 1.00 mm as I could manage. In reality, though, the digital vernier calipers that I used measured in increments of .05mm. So I typically saw numbers like 0.95, 1.00, and 1.05mm.

It was very tricky to thickness curly maple!  Not so much because the numbers are so precise and small (although that has its own difficulties), but more because of the “figuring” of the wood.

Since the wood is “curly” (also called “figured”), that means that the fibers of wood wave back and forth (or you might say “up and down”, if you lay the rib piece flat on a table), instead of being straight/flat. (It’s a lot like curly hair vs. straight hair.)  If you’re not careful enough, you get “tear-out” of the wood, where the blade from the plane you’re using catches the fibers (instead of cutting them), and then where the fibers angle down, the wood separates along the downward angle.  Since it’s “curly”, though, the fibers change direction and start angling up.  So they tear out.  Basically you end up with little dips in your wood where the tear-out occurs.  If you have a sharp enough blade and if you use the right angle when you plane, the blade should cut through the grain, instead of grabbing it and pulling it along.

As an aside, I’m not sure exactly what causes the figuring.  My personal speculation is that it’s somehow caused by the twisting rotation of the tree as it grows (perhaps following the sunlight throughout the day?).  But that’s just a guess!  I really have no idea, but I’d love to know!  :)

 

I began thicknessing a set of ribs (three pieces) with a block plane (turned at an angle, up to 45 degrees from “forward”) and with the wood clamped to my work bench.  Right away, I was getting too much tear-out.  I read somewhere that one way to prevent tear-out is to get the wood wet.  So I got a bowl of water and a washcloth, and sogged the wood a bit (evenly, front and back, to prevent warping), and then started planing.  It seemed to work.  It prevented most of the tear-out, anyways.  When the wood fibers seemed to start catching on the plane again, I would get it wet again.  (But by then (when I was first figuring out how to plane the wood with this method) it was usually too late and the tear-out had already occurred.)

This wet-planing went really quickly.  But a couple of warnings:

1. Don’t forget to dry your plane, when you’re done!  Else it might rust (even if you think it won’t!).
2. The wood will actually change size when it’s wet.  The ribs, when they were wet, were wider by at least a few millimeters (which is a lot, in the realm of violin making).  I imagine they were also thicker when wet, as well, so you need to take that into account when measuring with the vernier calipers.
3. The end result is kind of rough.  You’d still want to scrape the wood when the ribs dry.  It’s no where as neat and shiny as if you planed it dry.

Also, I still got some tear-out and the ribs in those places ended up much too thin.  So having a sharp blade is still important.

But in the end, though, I’m not sure you want to get the ribs wet like that.  I’m not sure what affect the water (and the wetting/drying process) would have on the final result, but I’m a little skeptical.

 

So I basically chalked up this set of ribs as my practice ribs, and I test things on these ribs, now (which have become really, really thin, as a result, and would never be usable.)

One of the things I tested, at someone’s recommendation, is setting the blade of the plane very, very shallow and making it very very sharp.  I tried that, and  I also tried NOT clamping the wood down, but holding it with my other hand (so that I could feel when it was about to tear out, better, and so that the rib would slip out of my hand rather than the plane tearing the wood fibers out).  It’s much, much slower that way, but the end result was really close to being amazing!  The only problem was that I still got some tear-out, even after that.  But the wood, where it wasn’t torn out, turned out to be as smooth as silk!  It’s really cool!  Unfortunately, though, part of the deal is that the blade of the plane needs to be really, really sharp.  So I needed to sharpen it again, before testing it on the next practice rib.  And then I needed to reset it back in the plane.  I was never able to get my other ribs as beautifully planed, after that.  :(  bummer.  I suppose with a lot more practice of sharpening and resetting the plane…..

 

Anyways, since that set of ribs was ruined (but not without benefit! I learned a lot!), I decided to try thicknessing a new set of ribs.  This time without water, and without using the block plane at all, and without clamping it down.  Things went much better once I figured out what would work.  The picture below shows the various tools I finally settled on using and their resulting wood shavings.

The below picture shows the tiny Ibex “finger plane” I bought.  (2 centimeters long, if I remember correctly.)  I also bought a “toothed” blade to put in it.  If you look closely at the inside part of the plane, you can see the “teeth” in this picture.  The teeth help minimize tear-out (but I’m not sure how).  They really do help!  But it doesn’t work perfectly.  You still need to be careful to avoid tear-out, and you still need to set the depth of the blade just right.  Trial and error…

The wood shavings are long and skinny and curly, after the first pass.  Kinda fun.  :)

I knew that often people use “scrapers” to remove wood when making a violin, so I’ve been trying to figure out what will actually work for me and what doesn’t.

In the next picture is a knife I found somewhere in my kitchen.  I think I got it from someone.  It’s not exactly a paring knife… maybe it’s a sharpened butter knife or something.  I’m not sure.  But it’s stainless steal, so it’s hard enough to use as a scraper (I’ve tried using aluminum.  no good).  I’m right-handed, and the bevel is on the “left”, while I’m scraping towards the right.  I alternate the angle that I hold the knife.  Sometimes I hold it so that it leans to the right and I scrape towards the right, but sometimes I hold it so that it leans to the left and I scrape towards the left.  The bevel is not equal everywhere.  It’s more blunt at the tip.  Again, trial and error.  I also found that turning the blade to an angle would sort of drive the shavings away to the side of the blade as I went, so I could go farther without having too many shavings in the way to see.  Plus, there was less possibility of tear out, I think.  And I had less of a “rippled/washboard” effect on the final product.

The wood shavings look longer than they really are.  The shavings compress into one another and result in a longer-looking, fragile, curly shape.

Interestingly, I think I was able to remove more wood in the same amount of time as the toothed finger plane.  But maybe if the toothed plane were the normal size of a block plane, that would work the fastest…  I’m kind of cheap, though, so I’m not sure I’ll buy such a thing to try it.

The “scraper” in the next photo is actually just a “painter’s knife”, which I found at an art store.  (I think it’s used for mixing oil paints…?)  I start by using it similarly to how I use the kitchen knife, above.  (although it’s more awkward to hold.)  It has no bevel (just a 90 degree edge), but is really thin and flexible stainless steal.  (A little less flexible towards the handle.)  You can see that the shavings are really small.

Sometimes I angle it towards the right, and then move leftwards with it.  I do that especially on places where I think the kitchen knife was too harsh on the fibers and started bending them instead of cutting them.  This method sort of seemed to undo the damage by cutting them from the opposite direction and possibly making them lay flat again.  Anyways, it brings the “shine” back again, where the wood looked a little rough.

Sometimes I brush it back and forth like a paintbrush to do some final scraping.  The result is more dust-like.

From what I hear, scraping the wood is always better than sanding the wood on the parts of the violin that go towards the outside (the parts that get varnished).  I suppose you don’t get the scratches left over from the grit/abrasive of the sandpaper.

I still wish I could have perfected the planing method that left the wood feeling as smooth and cool as silk, but this will have to do, for my first violin.  The thickness is really quite decent, so I don’t want to mess with it much more or else it’ll get too thin.

Mold and upper/lower/corner blocks

I cut the wood for the corner and end blocks, as well as the recesses in the mold for the blocks.

I decided to use the “tangential” method of setting the corner blocks in the mold because I wanted to make sure the grain was facing the points of the corners. (supposedly that’s the “right” way to do it. I think it makes the corners more resistant to damage from a side impact… or maybe it’s just easier to carve the blocks when they’re set that way.) So then I only had enough wood thickness to set them tangentially.  I think it’s far more common to set the blocks “square with the world”, but it means that you have to have “deeper” blocks. (Google for images of inside violin molds to see what I mean. There are very few pictures of the tangential method, and lots with the perpendicular/parallel method. Not-coincidentally, that means I’m not sure what I’m doing. ;) I’ll have to just make it up as I go, I guess. )

You can see the rough-cut blocks in the picture. The widest block (on the right) will be the neck block (aka upper block). Second-widest (moving left, in the picture) will be the lower block (aka bottom block). Then the two lower corner blocks are narrower still, and then the two upper corner blocks are the narrowest.

In the picture, the east-west direction of the blocks will become the up-down (top-plate to bottom-plate) direction in the mold (the “height”). I made them all around 35mm “tall”, to start with. In the end, the idea is to have the lower block be about 32mm tall, and the upper block about 30mm tall (I think… I need to verify that, though…) and the corner blocks are some height in between. (I’m not sure what the point of that is, though. I’ve read somewhere that it makes a difference in the sound, but I’m not sure what or why, at the moment…)

The up-down direction (table-to-sky) of the blocks in the picture will become the inside-to-outside direction of the blocks in the mold. This “depth” will vary… For the corner blocks, I will need every millimeter I have (I can’t remember at the moment, but approx 20mm?). The upper and lower blocks don’t need to be as deep. (Maybe around 15mm?)

And finally, the north-south direction of the blocks in the image will become the “widths” of the blocks around the circumferance of the mold. This varies, too. Strobel gives suggestions on these “widths” for the upper and lower blocks. The corner blocks are up to you, though, I guess. I measured the distances on my geometric template pattern between where two curves of different radii meet on one side of the corner to the next curve-change on the other side of the corner. I think, though, that I could have made them smaller. Oh well. If I’m careful about where/how I glue the ribs to the blocks, I can probably still make the corner blocks narrower prior to cutting/bending/gluing the linings. Or I could fashon some sort of inset to shrink the mold recesses down and then resize the blocks prior to bending/gluing the ribs.

The remaining wood that the blocks were cut from will be cut into the lining pieces. More about that when I get that far.

“Strad Poster”

Yay! My Strad poster finally made it.  As you can see, my kitty is excited too.  (He wanted to walk on it…  naturally.)

Anyways, this particular poster is of a violin known as “Titian” which was made by Stradiveri in 1715.  The front side of the poster shows photographs of the violin from different views. As well as a CT scan of the top. (Yes, the same kind of CT scan that a doctor uses. Technology comes in very handy for many reasons!)

The back shows the measurement details (lengths, distances, thicknesses, etc.) And more CT scans for additional thickness and arching detail. It also shows a thickness map of the front and pack plates, derived from the CT scans.

Being new to this, I’m not quite sure, but I think a lot of the stuff is meant to be to scale (although clearly not all of it). I don’t have time right now, but I’m sure I’ll analize it more, later.

:)

Making a Mold for the Geometric Pattern

I’m getting tired of waiting for my Strad poster to come in the mail…  Still n0 poster in the Saturday mail, so since I had the whole weekend to kill and nothing to do…

I had some aromatic cedar that at one time I thought I might make the mold out of, but later changed my mind to use something more conventional, instead (plywood or at least something without knots in it).  So, while I’m still waiting, I decided to “waste” the aromatic cedar on making a mold for the geometric violin pattern and save the plywood/knotless wood for a different pattern–assuming I find/make a pattern I like better.  And if I decide to go with the geometric version in the end (likely, at this point), then it won’t have been wasted (assuming the knots aren’t a problem…)

So, it’s probably unconventional, but it smells so nice!  :D

Cutting out the half-pattern…

I started using a scissors to cut the pattern out.  (it’s some thick cardboard from an art store)  Then I switched to an exacto knife.  That made a nicer/cleaner cut.  I wanted both sides of the pattern to be preserved.

First I traced around the edge of the inside of the pattern to make the outside outline (the outline for the front and back plates), just for reference.  Then I needed to reduce the outline by 4mm for the mold itself (3mm for the plates’ overhang, and another mm for the rib thickness).

I used the old “washer trick” and the outside of the pattern, as seen in the picture below, to reduce the outline by a constant amount.  It took a while to find a “washer” the right size.  This is some unknown piece of plastic left over from some project or another.

You put the pencil tip inside and roll it around the edge of whatever you’re reducing or enlarging.  This is why I wanted the outside of the outline well preserved and not cut up into several waste pieces.

I decided that if I make the geometric version, in the end, I wanted the middle to be a little bit narrower than the geometric pattern resulted in.  So I reduced that section by an extra not-quite-one-milimeter.  –or, to be more accurate, by the width of two cardboard credit-card shaped coupons from Lowes, which I held between the outline and the “washer”.  You can sort of see this in the picture above on the “C” bout.

Below is a picture of the outline for the plates (the outer pencil-line) and the mold (the inner pencil-line) copied onto my aromatic cedar, as well as some of the construction lines that were used in generating the template  (the lines which divide the various curves of differing radii.  I used those lines in deciding where to place the 6 blocks, which you can see sketched onto the mold as well (you can click the picture to see the full-sized version)).

You can also see that I joined two boards together to get the right width of wood for the mold.  This created a nice centerline, as well.  It was initially done as a practice project in joining wood.

Also, if you look closely enough, you can also see the pin holes (two on the top, two on the center line at the upper and lower bout width lines, and two at the bottom of the wood) that I made to pin the cardboard templates onto the board for steadiness while tracing and while “washer-reducing”.  For the inside template, you flip the template around and stick the pins into the same place.  Then, with the inside template pinned in place, put the outside template in position, and pin it down as well (anywhere.  I chose at the top and bottom).  Then unpin them both, and flip them around together and pin the inside down again.  Then finally place the outside template’s pins into the same holes in the cardboard, which makes new holes in the wood.  If that makes sense…  Or if it doesn’t, then whatever.  I’m sure you could figure it out if you needed to.  ;)

In this next picture, I am cutting on the inside line with my coping saw.  Aromatic cedar seems to be very easy to saw.  I positioned the outline so that I wouldn’t have to cut through any knots…  We’ll see if they become a problem, later, though.  I think they might be ok…

As you can see, I cut right through the places marked for the corners, because eventually I’ll make recesses in the mold for the 6 blocks.

Below, you can see the “finished” product.

I rough-cut it first, then went back and sawed it more closely to the line (which is what the random thin pieces of wood in the picture are from.  I’m particularly fond of the curved backwards-S shaped sliver on the right side of the mold.  Some places of it are less than 1mm wide, and it didn’t break.).  Then I sanded the edges (with the mini-sander you can see I made from a chunk of wood that I cut from the waste material near the bottom.

Ok, so it’s not actually finished, but it’s getting there.  I think I need to actually sand off another 1/2mm all around (achoo!) and more like 1mm in the middle C bouts (achoo-achoo!).  We seem to have a case of disappearing millimeters, here…  The measurements all around are less than 4mm reduced than the outline.  I suspect the washer wasn’t as wide as I thought it was…  Or maybe my cutting was too conservative (I doubt it, though, because I cut the original line away…)  Oh well, I’d rather have to cut more than wish I had cut less.  :)

I also need to decide the final block sizes and positions and cut the recesses for them.  Then I need to decide where/how I’m going to clamp the ribs on when I glue them and make the right holes in the mold so that I can do so.

And after all this, I won’t be surprised if my Strad poster comes tomorrow.  ;)  (although I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t, either…)

Outline Comparison (Geometric-Strobel vs. Bisiach-Strobel)

I made a 356mm half-drawing of the geometric outline presented by Strobel, and incidentally it was the left side.

Strobel also gives a full-sized half-pattern to use for a template in his “Violin Making” book, which is the right side of the violin (based on, but with modifications, a Stradivarius model violin made by Leandro Bisiach in 1925).

I decided to compare them a bit.  From what I can tell…

They are the same height.  The distances from the top for the lower width, stop, middle width, and upper width are the same.  For the geometric pattern (compared to the Bisiach-Strobel pattern):  The lower bout is very slightly narrower.  (Maybe 1mm…)  The lower corner is about 2.5mm further in and 1.5mm further up. The middle width is about 1mm wider.  The upper corner is about 1mm higher and has tighter curves.  (It might also be in further, but the curve differences make it hard to tell…)  The upper width is about 3mm narrower (and this is just the half-pattern that I’m comparing. The final upper width difference would be 6mm!)

The most significant differences I see are the “C” (because of the corner differences), and the upper bout width.

This is all good and wonderful to know, of course, but, realistically, I’ve only been playing violin for not-quite-2 years, so I wouldn’t actually know which outline would result in a more playable violin or a better sound.

I’m tempted to use the geometric model, just because it’s so cool, but if it varies significantly from other violin shapes I come across I might not.

Planing the wood for the back

I decided to start planing the wood for the back even though I haven’t decided on an outline or made a template, yet.  I’m still waiting to get my Strad poster in the mail so I can compare my options for the outline.  In the meantime, I’m anxious to get started.  :)

Planing a normal board would be pretty straight-forward.  This was trickier, I think, because you’re starting with a wedge-shaped piece of wood, only roughly cut.

The wedge came split down the middle (with a saw), but still attached at one corner.  (I uploaded a picture of that, in a previous post.)  First I had to finish splitting the two pieces apart.  I did that with a coping saw, but I think my hand-miter saw would have been a better idea.  Silly me.  I forgot I had one.  :)

So once it’s split, you need to think about which sides to join together when you book-match it.  This is complicated by the fact that you’re dealing with two wedges, instead of one square/rectangular board.  At first, you’d think that you would want to join them by simply “opening” them up and laying them down.  That is true in the end, but in the meantime, your two edges don’t join squarely while the boards are laying on the table.  You need to plane the edges to be perpendicular with the table before you can glue the boards together.

Here’s a picture of what I mean.  Start in the middle bottom (the picture of the tree with the wedge superimposed inside it) and follow the pictures clockwise.

The edges in the picture are marked with letters to help you follow what I mean.  Hopefully it’s not too confusing.

So that’s WHAT a person needs to do.  But HOW?  At first I thought I could clamp the two wedges together in a vice and plane the edge.  But the vice wasn’t going to hold the boards because they weren’t square/flat.  And how can you trust yourself to “freehand” a perfect 90 degree angle?  And even if you had some way of making sure your plane was flat (thus creating the 90 degree angle), you also have to think of a way to keep the boards clamped together in the vice.

So I came up with a different solution, which you can see below:

Here I am changing the angle of the edge labeled “B” in the picture at the top of this blog entry.

Luckily the block plane I’m using was pretty seriously constructed, so it had perfectly flat sides that I could turn the plane on and still have it lay solidly on my little workbench (without wobbling, I mean).  I figured I could trust it to be a true 90 degree angle, so I propped one of my wedges up on another board (so the blade could get to it), and started planing.  It worked really well.  :)

Completed full-sized geometric violin outline

I decided to try the geometric outline in a full-sized (4/4) version.  I made it on the smaller side.  Only 352mm.  (As opposed to the more standard 356mm).  But as far as I understand, it would still be considered 4/4.  I’m not sure if I’ll use this particular outline, though.  I might make a slightly larger one…  Or go off of some existing violin’s shape.

“Elegant geometric construction” of the violin

In Strobel’s book called, “Art and Method of the Violin Maker”, he presents a method for arriving at the shape of a violin.  I thought I’d try it out (on a smaller scale, because I didn’t have paper big enough for a full-sized drawing) to figure out what he was talking about.  In this picture, I’m about 3/4 done.

I thought, at first, that it would only produce points that you had to join together free-hand, but instead it generates ALL of the curves!  It’s really neat how it works out.  You only need a compass and a straight-edge (besides pencil and paper, obviously.)  No math necessary.  (Yay!)

I’ve been pondering what violin pattern or template to model my violin after.  I’ll try to compare this version to other patterns I come across.

Strobel presents a different pattern to use in his “Violin Making” book, which is based off of a real instrument.  So I might use that (because it would be convenient because it has all sorts of other measurements besides just the outline shape).

Or I ordered a Strad poster of Stradivari’s 1715 “Titian” violin, because I heard that you could make violins by taking measurements from them, as well.  So maybe I’ll go that route.  (Although I have no idea how practical that is… especially for a beginner.  At any rate, I’m still waiting for it to come in the mail from the U.K.)

Or maybe I’ll go from scratch using this geometric method –which could be a lot more work!  But I might learn more along the way.  I’ve already learned several new things tonight!  I’m also a “recovering perfectionist”, but I relapse sometims ;) and the geometrical beauty of this method really appeals to me.

We’ll see… I’ll have to think about it more…  In the meantime, though, this drawing is keeping me well entertained.  :)

Wood for back, sides, and inside blocks.

This is the wood I ordered.  I just got it in the mail.  Yay!  :)

The back piece is a wedge of quarter-sawn “well flamed” curly maple from 2000.  (The wide side of the wedge (resting on the table) was towards the outside of the tree, and the narrow side of the wedge (pointing up) was towards the inside of the tree.)

You can see where it has been sawn vertically down the middle most of the way, and then the sawing stops before the wedge was completely split in half.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe so you can be sure that the “two” pieces really come from the same log?  The point is to book-match the two pieces of wood (glue them along the thick edge of each wedge) to form the back so that the “flames” (or “figuring”) are symmetrical.

I read that you want your wood to be “aged” naturally for a while.  (not kiln dried like some other forms of lumber)  One website suggested 10 years minimum…  So I figured I’d attempt to find something like that.  (I think the aging is just so that it won’t crack later on as it continues to dry.  Supposedly it also affects the tone of the wood, but I’m not sure how…)  But I didn’t feel like it was very crucial, since this is only my first violin to make.  It’s not likely to sound very good anyways, so why waste too much money on really excellent wood?  On the other hand, if the wood makes a real difference in the sound of the instrument, then even if it is your first instrument, why work so hard on making it if it’s got bad wood?  It’s a tricky balance, and in the end I just didn’t care much, because I have no experience to confirm or deny the assertion that older wood is better.  I decided to “waste” a tad more money than I was expecting, just in case…  Afterall, a violin is made out of wood.  So that should probably be the focus.  You can tweak your carving to adjust the sound, later on, but you can’t switch the wood out without starting all over again on that particular element.

I ordered these particular pieces of wood from Lemuel Violins.  I like how they tell you the year that the wood was cut as well as the “grade” of wood it is.  I’m not really sure what causes a piece of wood to be one grade or another (according to that website), but I just went for something middle-of-the-road.  I suspect that it might have something to do with how straight the grain is, but I’m really just guessing about that.  The grain for the side pieces looks really straight.  The grain for the back is a little more erratic, but overall fairly straight.

I’m very happy that the flaming of the back and side pieces looks very similar.  Same “tightness”, AND same angle.  :)  (I was pretty worried about the angles not being the same…)  I took a risk by not ordering from a site that said they would be cut from the same piece of wood.  But the websites that I saw where the back and sides were from the same log didn’t mention anything about the age of the wood or the quality, and I thought that was probably more important.  But I made sure to get the back and sides from the same website, so that the phrase “well flamed” would most likely mean the same thing.

I haven’t seen an actual definition of “well flamed”, so I think it’s probably a somewhat subjective term.  Other websites said “flamed”, “better flame”, “higher flame”, “best flame” and other subjective or otherwise confusing adjectives to describe the flaming of the wood.  (And I couldn’t tell what order the subjective terms went in…  You can sort of guess based on the price differences, though.)

Anyways, when I buy my wood for the neck/scroll, I’ll probably highly consider Lemuel Violins again, simply to keep the meaning of “well flamed” the same so that it hopefully matches best…  I will still worry about the angle of the figuring, though…  Maybe I should have ordered it at the same time so that they could have tried to match it, but I didn’t want the expense, just yet.  (One thing at a time, right?  Who knows if I’ll even like doing this?!  :)  I’m trying to keep the motto of not spending money on something until I really need it.  –although I’ve already broken that by ordering the wood for the back.  But I wanted to be sure the sides would match, and needed to know if I’d have to order new sides (the cheaper of the two, by far!), if they didn’t.)

I wanted something with a tight curl/flame, because my own violin has a tight curl to it, and that’s what I’ve gotten used to and really love the look of.

As for the side pieces…  There’s three of them.  I’ll have to research more about what to do with them.  lol  I thought there would be five pieces.  (two for upper bout, two for lower bout, and one cut in half for the two c-bouts)  Clearly I’m wrong.  :)  If I sit and speculate a bit, I guess you use one piece from the bottom button to the lower corner, then the rest of that same piece for the c-bout.  then the second piece can be used for the two upper bout sides, and the third piece can be used like the first piece was.  But that’s just a guess.  I’d have to consider the direction of the figuring, as well…

They’re each about 2mm thick, and over 40 mm wide.  Since it sounds like the ribs only need to be about 31-33mm wide (or tall, once they’re on the violin), I wonder if I can slice off the excess and use it for the lining…  Unless the lining needs to be made of spruce or something (to keep the weight down?  maple is denser).

And as for the wood for the corner/end blocks: I bought spruce.  I figured it was a good light-weight wood, and I’ve seen it suggested for the corner/end blocks, so I figured why not?  My own violin is rather heavy, I think, so I’d like to keep the weight down, too, if I can.  I think violin makers aren’t as picky about the kind of wood they use for the blocks and lining, though, as they are about the back and top plates.  I’m not sure how the blocks affect the sound.

(I kind of wished I could have incorporated aromatic cedar into my violin somehow (maybe the blocks or the lining), just because it smells so lovely.  But (aside from the fact that I don’t know much about various woods) I worried about the oils affecting the rest of the violin.  Plus the smell dissipates after a while and you have to sand it to get the smell to come back –which wouldn’t really be an option inside of a violin.)

I also wonder if there might be left over material from the spruce that I could make the linings out of…  That would be nice, but I haven’t measured it, yet.

Books to learn from

In this picture, you can see 4 of the books that I plan to use to help me figure out what I’m doing.  ;)  I also plan to consult the internet frequently!

Three of them are by Henry Strobel, and written a couple of decades ago.  From most of what I hear, they’re pretty useful for a beginner.  I’ve read through a little over half of “Violin Making Step by Step”, and sometimes I thought that there were specialty words or processes that weren’t as well defined as  I would wish.  But that’s why you also read other books, I guess.

The fourth book pictured here is “Violin Making” by Walter H. Mayson, and I found it online (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28252) and printed it off at a print shop because I wanted a hard copy.  In contrast to the Strobel books, this one was written about a century ago!  It’s very interesting to read, simply for the fun of the words and writing tone the author uses.  :)  I like how he writes as if he’s standing in front of you showing you what he’s doing.

I don’t really own any power tools, and they can be pretty spendy things to buy, so I think I’ll try to make do without them.  (Plus, I’m a girl, and they kinda scare me…  lol)  The Strobel book references things like a bandsaw and a drill press regularly, so that was a little discouraging to me, but then I came across the Mayson book.  It doesn’t rely on power tools very often.  (Which probably has something to do with the time period the book was written in. ;) )  It does mention a bandsaw, but I like his way of phrasing it:  “take the block to a good band sawyer, and get him to saw just through the inner line”.  So if I decide to go the bandsaw route, then that gives me an excuse to beg a friend to do it for me, instead of buying one and trying to figure it out for myself.  ;)  Realistically, though, I’ll probably just try to use my coping saw, if possible…  I guess we’ll see…

(Plus, Stradivari couldn’t have used a bandsaw or a drill press, so I figure it must be possible without them.  ;)  )  Anyways, the Mayson book uses a very different method to make the violin (making the plates first, and then making an outside mold to make the ribs on, afterwards), but I like that it mostly just references the use of hand tools.