Violin Build: More Steps

Hi’ all,

Here’s how I’ve progressed with the violin. I installed the ‘purfling’ and in the first picture am using a wonderful little tool called a scraper to scrape the wood purfling flush with the violin’s surface. I have three different shapes of scrapers, concave, convex and square. They are not nearly s sharp as a razor but, when pulled on an angle, do an awesome job of smoothly scraping just enough wood to do a careful, yet thorough, leveling of the wood. I was amazed at how pleasant scraping and sanding can be. The hard part is not scraping or sanding too much.

The second picture shows the inside of the spruce top on the left with the ‘bass bar’ installed on the left and the maple bottom on the right. Next to the top is the piece of spruce the bass bar was shaped from. I had to cut, carve, sand and scrape the wood to get that shape. They didn’t make this violin kit easy. You still have to do a lot of the work from scratch. What the kit manufacturer did is shape the top and bottom, with the sides installed on the bottom. The neck and head are also shaped. I’m sure they used automated CNC type machines to do the work. The builder has to make all the parts fit which involves lots of cutting, scraping and sanding. There’s still lots of detailed work to do for the builder.

After the bass bar installation, I have now been scraping and sanding the top and bottom pieces. Rounding the sharp edges and smoothing out any scratches or rough spots in the wood. The spruce wood for the top tends to be kind of flaky and requires different grades of sandpaper to smooth some spots. As I said, scraping and sanding are very soothing activities. It’s hard to keep from going too far. You’ve seen movies where there’s the old guy sittin’ on the porch just a’ whittelin’ away on a piece o’ wood, oblivious to the fighting and gunshots goin’ on round’ him? Yup’! That’s how it feels . . .

In the last picture, I’m doing a dry run of the clamping procedure so I won’t spend too much time clamping the top to the body while the glue starts to dry. I will design a label to put inside with my name and date before closing it up, also. That way we’ll know who to blame when some design flaw becomes apparent, like the neck got put on upside down, or something . . .