jacobsaunders

I suppose that you are looking at a Bavarian or a south or east Bohemian (i.e. not Schönbach area) cello from the end of the 18th C. There are quite a lot of them, so I would be a trifle wary of anyone who felt destined to put a definitive name to it. Is the pegbox just re-cheeked, or entirely replaced, because that disturbed a little?

the commercial scrolls in the white, that one could, in the day, buy from some catalogue like Wurlitzer et al, were generally from Markneukirchen, if not a few from Mirecourt. The one on the fiddle is neither. It is a valiant attempt by a timid amateur who didn't really know what he was doing. I suppose you could call it „American cultural heritage“ if you were trying to sell it.

Hardly, Looks more like some Dentist or Accountant in my dads night school

I met Mr. Meyer in November 2016, when he came to present his book to us (us = VGÖ = Verein Österreichische Geigenbauer). Mr. Meyer isn't a violin-maker or a musicologist but rather has his background in engineering and collecting Berlin violins has been a long term hobby of his. Even if one could pick an argument about this or that pre-conception, his book is very good. He divides the Berlin violin.-makers into various groups, depending upon which school they came from and has very good full sized pictures of the best specimens he could get hold of etc. and since I very much support such initiative, I bought a copy of his book. I have however not found any picture of any member of the Hammig family, which is quite a large Markneukirchen dynasty, one could write and ask politely at the Museum in Markneukirchen, if they could help. http://www.museum-markneukirchen.de/kontakt.php

It is often very difficult, if not impossible to have a dogmatic opinion about where a violin originally comes from, particularly those which appear to have been conceived from day one as some sort of copy (there are may degrees of “copy”). A few features of yours however do hint towards one of those Markneukichen “copies” of the late 19th C. The slightly strange outline, the scroll profile the absence of pins and the rib corners, for instance, as well as the artificial shading that reminds me of “Nußbeize” (Nut stain), French dirt for instance is a different colour. Upon looking inside, I would expect corner blocks with an equilateral triangle plan view, not let in linings, and perhaps even a light greyish-brown water stain finish to the entire inside. To know all that for certain would be helpful, but since you will have to take the belly off to attend to the belly sound post crack anyway, you could post pictures of the inside later.

Many years ago, a very good Viennese customer of mine decided to cut down a big pear tree in his garden. He was infatuated with the idea that I should make him a Cello out of it. I didn't think a fat lot of his idea, since he has a super Grancino Cello anyway, but was in a polite and helpful mood. I asked the local Organ builder what to do with it, and followed his recommendation to take it to Herr Zöbish in Unterbergen. Herr Zöbisch was a very very old, but nice man, who had something like a band saw, with five paralell blades and an attached railway carriage. He told me straight away, that he personally would use it for firewood, but understood that the trees owner had something of an irrational relationship with his tree. I had to wait until Herr Zobisch’s rainwater reservoir (which drove the saw) was full, and he sawed it up into 50mm thick planks, which I then painted the ends of with wax. The tree spent the best part of 20 years in my roof until I persuaded my Cello customer that it would make a fine kitchen table, and organised him a carpenter suitable for the job. He is now thrilled with his kitchen table from self-grown wood, and everybody lived happily ever after.

All this fuss about a little blustery weather!

Dear Jeff, I think you will find that the spruce (or maple) schrinks in the width, not length

I think one could spend the whole evening fruitlessly arguing about this. For instance if the fingerboard “goes down” or in fact the belly comes up,. Although I get laughed at when I say it, a violin, unromantically viewed, is a wooden box under tension, where the back (longitudinally) gets stretched, and the belly clinched. One result of this, when one has to judge if an antique violin is composite, or if all the bits belong together, is that the belly length should measure roughly a mm or two shorter than the back. There are two (main) schools of thought re. the bass bar. One (for instance Möckel in his book) thinks that the bass bar is a spring, which pushes back against the string pressure transmitted from the bridge,. The other, like me, conceives the bass bar more as a strengthening strut. I think an advantage of an “integral carved” bar, is that it by definition has 0% “Tension”, which is what I always try to achieve when fitting and glueing a new one.

Chep Schönbacher “Dutzendarbeit”, probably a little pre-WWI. Possibly child size (or you have big hands)

I lived in Krems an der Donau in the 90's, and one year half of the town, and surrounding area got massively engulfed by the Danube. My experience was that, at the time, there was absolutely nothing one could do, but twiddle your thumbs and make daft jokes that Krems an der Donau had become Krems im Donau (roughly; Krems on the Danube had become Krems in the Danube). After about a week the water went away of it's own accord, and everything was covered in a thick revoltingly smelly putrid grey sludge. In the period as the people were shovelling the sludge away, I got a few “flooded” violins given to me. I just hung them on the balcony (mostly because I didn’t want my workshop to smell like that!) and forgot about them. After about 2 months, when they had thoroughly dried out, I took them to bits and scrubbed them (with tap water and a short haired brush), put them back together, and cleaned them in the normal way, and they were all perfectly all right. I think the only chemical you need is patience.

Here is an Original (I am pretty sure) tail piece belonging to a Stadlmann Cello that I have in bits in my cupboard. The Cello would be from 1780ish, and remains in it's original state, although it has proved tasty for wood worms. The “tail gut” is made of 2mm diameter silver wire, which was soldered onto the squarish silver plate. This tail piece and “gut” is the best part of a quarter of a millennium old, and (should you ignore a little tarnish) in perfect nick. As such, I would qualify any worries that silver might stretch or break that might have been expressed in this thread as abject bollocks. Some previous owner (presumably) has had his initials engraved on the silver plate. The wooden part is made of some fruit wood, I think pear, although that is a little difficult to be dogmatic about because of the black stain. The front surface is a roughly 2,5mm thick ebony veneer. To save anyone’s time, I will not be parting company with it

Yes, you are right, sorry, my mistake. We do not see American brands here and have little knowledge (or interest) in them. Perhaps an American Maestronetter could look up Jacobus Hornsteiner in an old American wholesaler catalogue? As far as the Cello is concerned, I could well imagine that it is an early Bubenreuth creation. (The angel it comes with obviously not)

Hornsteiner was a music shop in Passau who sold no end of cheap stuff from everywhere, that he stuck his Label in. Mostly Musikwinkel, although he was an ethnic Mittenwalder.

Rather than telling you anything, „ribs set in a grove“ allows you to exclude any schools (i.e. 95% of everything existant) that didn’t employ this sub-group of „ribs-built-on-back“ technique. A good guess here would perhaps be an old French Instrument, although good luck finding out which one of them it could be. The label is what I would call a „Fahrkarte“ (train ticket) here, I wonder when photo-copy machines were invented, although 18th. C. seems a bit of a stretch.