Category: violins

Completed March 2021

I asked my original violin tone wood supplier for name ideas. This was what he came up with. No explanation. The name means nothing to me, but I felt the need to suck up to him since I was buying mail-order and he was selecting tone wood for me sight unseen. Recently, however, I lucked into a different source for beautiful aged maple backs: a man for whom it was a bit of an obsession to buy 30- to 60-year-old tone wood at auction from the estates of late violin makers. When the man’s wife got pregnant with twins and they needed money, he put his collection up for sale, and I bought all he had. I now have enough wood for another 150 violins and don’t have to suck up to tone wood suppliers for at least 10 to 15 years!

Violins are traditionally made with spruce tops; flamed maple backs, sides and necks; and ebony fingerboards and accessories. Spruce and maple are still abundant and sustainably harvested, but ebony and other tropical hardwoods are quickly becoming endangered. All 26 of my apprentice violins were made with ebony fingerboards, but my 27th will be made with a synthetic ebony developed and produced in Switzerland. It is acoustically equivalent to ebony, with the same look, feel, and weight. Its drawback: it’s about three times the price.

Completed February 2021

Search “Eddie Izzard ― Heimlich maneuver.”  It has nothing to do with violins, but it’s funny.

Completed February 2021

I think of Guntar and Heimlich as “the twins.” I was (and am) still learning the art of varnishing and initially thought the twins would look quite different, but they turned out nearly identical. One way of adding color to a violin is by using colored varnish and adding as many layers as needed to get the desired color depth. A downside of this method is that too much varnish can muzzle the tone of the violin, so one might need to stop adding layers before reaching the hoped-for color.

Completed January 2021

Named after my favorite dog, a 100 pound black lab who once crawled under a parked but rumbling fire truck to fetch a roll of duct tape I had dropped. If I sang “O Sole Mio” he would howl along with me, sounding better than I did. 

This violin has a beautiful tone that sings long after the note has been struck.

Completed December 2020

The purfling is the border of black and white lines around the perimeter of the violin top and back. It is made of thin wooden strips laminated together and inlayed just one to two millimeters into the wood. Purfling is both decorative and functional, as it helps prevent cracks from moving through the edge to the center of the violin. Examine the left lower corner of Excalibur and see how I carved right through the thin purfling, where I hadn’t inlaid it deep enough.  Live and learn!

Completed November 2020

Named for Davide Sora, master violin maker from Cremona, Italy, home of Stradivari, Guarneri, Amati, and many other “old masters.” Davide started making violins in 1978 at the age of 14, and in 2011 began producing detailed videos documenting every step of his meticulous violin-building process. He was nearly finished with the project when I discovered his videos on YouTube, shortly after I’d made a mess of “Abomination.” Learning from his videos felt even better than an in-person apprenticeship, as I could watch everything this master craftsman was doing from inches away from his hands, and he never got annoyed with me for asking him to do it just one more time.

At the time, Davide had not yet posted his varnishing videos, so I was on my own while finishing his namesake violin. I put a dark stain on the top plate without sealing the wood, and the end grain sucked up way more color than it was supposed to. The result was dark and blotchy, making the violin look like it had been saved from a fire. “Live and learn,” I said, and varnished it anyway. But when I was refitting Davide, I knew that Davide Sora, the master luthier, would not be happy to have his name on the instrument the way it was. So I stripped it, removed the top to fix the overhang, re-carved the fingerboard, and re-varnished from the ground up. Davide still wouldn’t be happy, but I am!

Completed November 2020

Not named for the beer. 

The scroll is a bit of a prankster, as the curves seem to change direction when you least expect it. Early in my apprenticeship, I was constantly going back to my reference material for reassurance, as I found it very difficult to visualize the evolution from pegbox to scroll to volute to eye. Like everything, though, scroll carving gets easier with practice. On my fifth or sixth scroll, I finally “got it.” 

For just my third attempt, Corona ended up with a surprisingly smooth, mature tone.

Completed October 2020

I forgot to write this violin’s name on the label inside, so if you’re on another side of the political spectrum, you could call it “Bernie” or “Brandon.” This violin originally was shaded a bit more orange than I like (another political statement?), and the color dulled the flame appearance of the maple on the back. Completed in October 2020, when I adjusted the fittings in May 2022, I stripped the original varnish and redid it more in the style of my later violins. I like the way it looks.

Something else I should have corrected when the varnish was off is the edge overhang around the body. It’s quite clunky and uneven. I may take the violin apart and correct this. It will increase the space inside the body, which will effect the tone and sound volume. I’m curious to see how it might change. 

While not anywhere near perfect, neither is Biden a “VSO” (Violin Shaped Object). My second violin is a significant improvement over Abomination.

Completed September 2020.

This was my first attempt at building a violin since violin-making school, 35 years earlier. Traditionally, the top plate of the violin body is made of spruce, but I messed up the only piece of spruce tone wood I had, so I tried again with a length of vertical grain Douglas Fir that was left over from a furniture project. Note the very wide grain. Or should I say, just try to ignore it. This top was very difficult to carve, especially since I had only one small gouge that wasn’t very sharp.