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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…