Jerry Lynn

The prices in the link appear to be both retail and possibly in canadian dollars. I order mine from Met Music. I use Milo Stamm blanks almost exclusively. I find the premium grade to be just about right for the hardness I’m looking for. I made the switch from Aubert when many of the deluxe blanks I was ordering were unusable (very wide grain, off the quarter, soft, etc.). I couldn’t afford to buy them and not have them be usable. I’ve never worried about a Stamm blank arriving and being disappointed with it.

Pretty much!

Nice work, Nikos! I love that style of knurling, it’s different than what most so do for 3d printed parts.

I think the Reserva Escoda brushes are just that good. (Not that you don’t keep your brushes in nice shape, I’ve seen them, and you do…. I’m a slob by comparison) Since I got the recommendation from you, I’ve bought a lot less brushes.

What are you using?

Hammerl alcohol colors - the ones that come in powdered form, not the extracts. I tried some of the suggested alcohol based inks, but they seemed to bleed a bit for me. I’ll mix the powders in alcohol and then dropper the colors into the scotchlite in a small jar. I’ll leave the jar lid slightly off to allow the alcohol to evaporate before mixing with hide or bone glue.

Thinking out loud, with some experience peppered in: Most of my experience with strange holes in either plates or peg boxes occurs where they go straight though, if not initially then by the time i'm through cleaning out whatever junk is in there. In the instances where its been made to be a circular hole, the joint between a straight walled hole and same grain plug has been pretty good - I never wished for a tapered fit. That's not to say you also can't cut tapered same grain bushings on a cnc router and use a reamer, I do it all the time. It just seems like overkill for tiny stuff. In instances where the hole cannot be made easily cylindrical, I usually make a small scale cast of the hole with something like reprorubber, scan the cast and mill out several replacement pieces and pretend I'm an optometrist by asking myself which one is better. Most who go down the route of filling pin/screw holes with wood with out digital tools usually do it with a something similar to a core drill to make the plug material. It doesn't take much to make such a cutter, it doesn't even need to be hardened for quick use. What you are talking about is I think is also possible, either by making a custom cutter and plug former, or better yet using a ball end mill to plunge and a radius cutter in a lathe to match the diameter of the end mill. Turning same grain material in a lathe is difficult, but not impossible. All of this fun machine stuff aside, for something like the OP's instrument, I'd probably try fillers first after removing some of the offending material. You can really do wonders with scotchlight, and if you don't like it it is easily washed out.

I swapped it out for one of the correct size, should look okay now.

So, I do small same grain "bushings" kind of frequently. The mill Interpolates them pretty well. Takes nothing to draw in cad. My first time doing it from a few years ago to fill in parts of pins so I didn't have to take the button back further for a new crown: The ones in the first pic were my first attempt, and I did't have the tool path quite right. The second pic I felt pretty good about (show here glued in). I've done it since these slightly smaller and larger. When fitting to an existing pin hole of some sort, I usually clean up the hole with an appropriate sized drill bit.

In my experience, bleached shellac that has been dissolved in alcohol also seems to have a very limited shelf life when incorporated into retouching varnish. In what seems like very little time it turns into a snotty mess.

Though I will sometimes retouch under a microscope (mostly fill varnish into hairline cracks), most of the time I use a stereo microscope for crack cleaning. A .5 Barlow lens is useful for increasing the usable distance between the microscope and the instrument, increasing the field of view, and decreasing the magnification by half. I find head worn magnification, aka “becker checkers” to be more useful for retouching.

If you are looking for a filler for missing wood fibers, scotchlight s22 seems to be the current best option. It can be colored with various alcohol based colors. It gets mixed with hide or bone glue and applied to the area of missing fibers (with room left for fill varnish and retouching above). If it is unacceptable, it can be washed out. If you are looking for fill varnish recipes a combination of manilla copal, sandarac, and light shellac can work well with copal being the dominant resin. Additions of aluminum hydroxide can allow you to use softer resins, but may decrease clarity. Using a matting agent allows you to vary the sheen. With all fill varnish, the window for easy trimming doesn’t last forever.

As much as I love Fusion (I’m a paid user), the bulk of work I do with patches is done with meshlab and Roland’s proprietary cam (it’s very similar to Desk Proto). It’s just how I’m used to working - I can program in fusion just fine, it’s just overkill for most patches. The resolution and accuracy on the latest generation iPhone I’m not sure quite high enough to bank on... it’s astonishing for what it does, but at 1-5% error rate over a given set of stitched together scans… I’m not so sure I’d trust it. I also can’t find information on resolution. I might try it for kicks and report back. A few more years and it might be amazing. A better cheap option is to construct your own structured light scanner. The Accuracy and repeatability on a lot of the desk top CNC routers is getting better… it is really tough to judge the accuracy and repeatability of them based on their published specs. A better low end option would be to learn how to construct your own, or do what I did and bought old tech to start.

Hide glue is more than fine. I’ve already taken apart instruments that I’ve installed under edge inserts on due to accidents from their owners, they seem to hold up just fine.

I'm not going to comment on your age publicly, I do that enough privately Yes, enhancement of abilities does drive tech.... in the case of scanning and milling wood, the thing we are most inhibited by is that it's still borrowing from other industries (Dentistry, reverse engineering, subtractive rapid prototyping, scanning cosplay widgets for friends, etc.) That's not necessarily a bad thing. Everything right now is more than adequately at a level where the means to reproduce missing material by subtractive manufacturing exceeds the materials ability to hold extremely tight tolerances - i.e. breathing on the patch is in theory going to ever so slightly change its shape - not enough to worry about though. The area of tech to watch that is currently on the periphery of violin repair is 3d printing. While I don't think we'll see it in use for printing any sort of wood material, I think the technology could be adapted to print retouching onto a transferable substrate. They already have printers working in shellac...