David Burgess

Oh my gawd! Real violinmaking shops do not have clean floors! Customers like shavings, and If there are no shavings on your floor, customers will assume you bought instruments from China and inserted your label.

How much does China charge on US fiddles? Didn't they just drop tariffs on US cars to the same rate they charge for cars coming in from other countries? So maybe some progress is being made.

Yung Huanganini.

The same can be done with a modern setup, but it's not usually considered "best practice", and modern players often don't tolerate large changes in neck thickness well.

Don't many of them have Italian labels already?

Update, hear the fiddle: https://www.thestrad.com/video/paganinis-il-cannone-violin-played-in-columbus-ohio/8959.article?utm_source=adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_campaign=20827

Kows? Ick! Have you tried sheep?

What baroque violin setups did not incorporate an overstand? Geez, dude, take your blinders off for a moment or two.

The overstand is not by any means a modern thing. The methods of achieving that have gone through various iterations. Open your eyes, and learn.

Those flexi-legs might work OK, but wouldn't it be even better to glue or bolt the wooden tabletop to a four foot high, two foot wide, and six foot long chunk of of cast concrete? I didn't realize how much my Ulmia bench flexed until I posted a roughing video here, and someone pointed it out. I have since braced it against a concrete wall (on one axis), and that has delivered an improvement.

These basic setup dimension were around long before the Newark School. I do. The differences between going too high or too low may not be readily apparent to an audience, but they are to a good player. This has largely to do with the envelope in which the instrument can be played. Granted, it takes a pretty large change in string angle for a noticeable difference if both are played the same way. But the right angle enables a playing style which delivers more power, if the player knows how to use that.

It doesn't. This seemed counter-intuitive to me too, so I had to try it for myself.

Dang engineers!

In my own experiments, the spring rate of the top didn't seem to change with increases in vertical loading. It behaved like a linear spring, at least within the range of loadings I tried. In other words, if a 5 pound load deflected the top 1 mm, a 10 pound load deflected it 2 mm, and a 15 pound load defected it 3 mm. So the amount of preload didn't seem like it would change how much the top moves due to string vibration. This wasn't what I expected, but I got what I got.

In household lighting, LED's have gotten to the point where they emit more lumens-per-watt than fluorescent bulbs. I have no idea whether this applies to the UV range. It could be very different. LED efficiency varies at different wavelengths.