JohnCockburn

only because violins don't have frets

Recently made a small Grancino model viola. The original has 60 mm upper eye spacing. Chickened out a bit and made it 58mm. Used a 46 mm bridge (as I always do) and put the bar in the right place for that. Works fine.

Is that a violin scroll in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?

Doing this: bending iron site:maestronet.com will give you more information than you could possibly need.

What a time to be alive!!

I recently discovered a material called "plywood". Amazing stuff: inexpensive, dimensionally stable, and readily available in suitable thicknesses for mould making.

I thought that this had now been established beyond reasonable doubt by CT scans?

If OP has a ball end fine tuner a loop end string will work fine. I’d assumed they had an integrated tuner tailpiece.

Of course. That would be bonkers.

But many (possibly most) people who "copy" the Messiah are just using the outline as the basis for a PG Strad model. Which is kind of my point. No matter what mistakes the OP makes further down the road, if they start again and make a decent job of the mould they’ll always have a nice PG form to go back to for future instruments. PS I'd encourage anyone making templates/mould for the first time to read the John Dilworth Trade Secrets article on the subject.

In general I’d agree. But not at such an early stage as this.

I think only you can decide whether or not to start again. I would, because knowing something was wrong from the start would drive me nuts. But everyone’s different.

So what would typically be made too heavy? Blocks? Linings? The ribs themselves?

It seems plausible that static load might affect the response of a violin body to external stimuli. A simple analogy would be the influence of a DC bias on the small signal AC response of an electrical circuit, which can either be negligible, huge, or somewhere in between, depending on the linearity of the system at the operating point. Not a hill I’m particularly interested in dying on. just chewing the fat, like,

The Maurin Strad (1718) was what he played from the late 80s until the quartet disbanded.