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Progress on the “Plowden” Guarneri del Gesu-model violin
The Plowden is “in the lead” and pulling ahead!
One fiddle is running ahead of the others. That is how it usually turns out when I am building more than one instrument simultaneously. Something catches my attention in one instrument, and I bolt for the finish line with it. I don’t know why…happens every time, though. I think this will be one of my best efforts, and should turn out to be a concert-quality violin. We will see, though.
Scroll and neck complete– Fingerboard temporarily glued in place
There will still be fine-point tweaking and smoothing I will do, up until the day I begin varnishing, but the scroll was nearly enough complete that I went ahead and mounted a fingerboard on the neck, and began shaping the two of them together. The string “nut” (the tiny bar of ebony that will cross the top of the fingerboard as a support and anchor for the strings as they cross over into the pegbox) will be fitted and installed pretty much the last thing before the bridge, soundpost, and final set-up.
Setting the Neck
Once I had the entire neck shaped, with the exception of the final shaping of the heel (which is completed after the back plate is installed), I could begin setting the neck.
Now: I used to install the back plate and then install the neck, but that meant that when I set the neck, I had to continually worry about the angle of the heel as it presented itself to the button (the top “tongue” of the back plate that overlaps the heel of every violin-family instrument…critical to the strength of the joint.) If I install the neck first, making sure that the heel overlaps the neck block at least a little, so that I can plane it absolutely flat before installing the back plate, I eliminate the struggle to get that perfect heel-to-button joint. It becomes perfectly easy.
So…for all you luthiers reading this, yes, I am aware of the traditional way to fit this joint. I learned this particular option from reading the work of the late David Rubio. It took me a few years to recognize the value of the change, and I tried it for the first time when working on my first cello. It worked so well that I have gradually begun to do it on all my instruments.
Here is the back of the instrument, mold still in place:
Here is the side view:
And the front view:
What’s Next?
The next step will be to level the back of the corpus, so that the blocks and the neck-heel are all in the same plane. I may have to wait until the mold has been removed before completing that task: the mold is pretty much level with the blocks, and I have no desire to sand the mold. So, I may end up removing the mold, installing the linings, and then levelling the back of the corpus, along with the heel of the neck. Then I can clean up the inside of the corpus, shaping the linings and blocks, and cleaning up any rough spots. Then I can install the back plate and get moving on the purfling. After that it will be time to do all the final preparations for varnishing.
So…that is the progress report for this week.
I will try to catch up on the 14-inch viola and the 3/4 size violin soon.
Thanks for looking.