jacobsaunders

A nice usual, late 19th C

Interestingly this violin doesn’t have a “rectangular cut out” but an innovation that I hadn’t seen before, and wrote about here https://maestronet.com/forum/index.php?/topic/339564-seidel/&do=findComment&comment=789240 Perhaps we should all bow to the obvious and award David with the 1st. prise for his innovation, which is evidently head & shoulders above anything else https://maestronet.com/forum/index.php?/topic/328110-look-ma-no-saddle/

https://maestronet.com/forum/index.php?/topic/338413-leo-aschauer-label-violin-comments/

We are discussing ones like this, not your tap tone optimised ones

You can push and shove to your hearts content. what is too long isn't shorter

Indeed, a carved integral bar is more work than sticking one in afterwards. This tells us that it was the style and tradition of the area, and not a time saving short cut, as often ridiculously claimed. It finally became extinct when they started using milled plates. You are quite right, if you spend decades doing something day in, day out, you get pretty good at it

It is routine, that when re-glueing bellys, there is to much rib, and not enough belly outline due to wood shrinkage in the width, but hardly in the length. The usual solution is to shorten the ribs

Spruce is far more bendy “on the slab” than it is with annual rings standing up, sod “tap tones”

the critical thing about necks, ist that they point at the bridge once one is finished

Glue the box together, then fit the neck into the "socket", which I would call a mortise

Several times in this thread, it has been emphasised that one cannot tell if a bar has been fitted with spring, unless one has removed it. Over the decades, I have gradually accumulated a drawer full of bass bars that I have soaked out of various fiddles. There are all sorts of lengths shapes and sizes, but one thing that they all have in common is that they, even after they have dried out a couple of days, do not “fit” at all, so that any pronouncement if they had had spring or not would have been reading tea leaves. Also the marotte that they had to fit flawlessly was definitely NOT shared by our 18th C colleagues, one can see plane and knife marks etc., and “near enough” was clearly the order of the day. I remember my father having a period where he was convinced that fitting bars “on the slab” i.e. with the annual rings at 90° to the normal was the way to go. I thought “oh bloody hell, another nutjob”, but later I removed one and replaced it with a “normal” bar, and regretted it, since I found that it had sounded much better before I fiddled with it

You could ask the OP how it sounds. VdA seems to be on holiday

One can always “go to town” restoring violins, although considered soberly, one might ask oneself if the exercise was worth it at the end of the day. I have used this method, when re-fitting an original bar back in over repair cleats, where bass bar cracks were to be repaired, but the customer insisted on retention of the original bass bar. For a straight forward bass bar replacement, it does rather leave me thinking of the old joke about “how many violin makers does it take to replace a light bulb?”

Just think, you could save all that p+++ing around if you just did an "integeral" bar

No, Junk