Salve Håkedal

Thank you. But I'm not trying to remove it. I just wanted to put it on this forum to share some learning. I put the lighting for the photograph in a postition to make the effect as visible as possible. It's not really worrying me on this fiddle. I would have been worried if it had happened to me with an old Mittenwalder or something.

I built this (undecorated hardanger) fiddle in 1988. At the time I was reading Sacconis book. I did not use waterglass, luckily, but for some time I used what he recommended for isolating the water glass from the varnish: Gum arabic, honey, sugar and egg white as a ground. Under a spirit varnish made of propolis, shellac and sandarac. The arching on this fiddle was made rather steep at the neck block, so after 30 years heavy use the the table had come loose from the block. I opened it and put a piece of felt on the area close to the block area and moistend it with water over night and then let it dry well. The intent was to remove the deformation (.. kindof, I didn't use any pressure). I found it worked OK, so I glued the table back, and the fiddle is now doing fine, except.... maybe of interest to some: The moisture coming through from the inside left the varnish unharmed. But maybe not the ground? The reflection from the wood in the moistend area is now reduced. This should be seen clearly in the photo as a darker area. So I'm thinking of others instruments, some of them rather valuable, like old germans with a glue size ground or similar water soluble substances. Maybe this is a warning? -- Salve, from the backwoods of Norway.

Shellac is tough and Sandarac is kind of brittle, I think(?) But I'm not familiar with Manila Copal. Will it add softness/ductility to the mix? Or something else?

I would not accept any gap at all. And I don't "spring" the joint. With a well set up plane and bench you should be able to make "perfect" contact between the 2 halves.

TedN, of course your first violin was "horrendous"! Everybodys first violin is rather unusuable, i'd think. But to go to the other extreme: copying another makers method, even down to using his exact tools like you say you did .. well .. grrrrrrrr! I'm a self taught maker with some success. (Admittedly, I had woodworking skills already when I started on fiddles.) Of course I didn't do it in total isolation. Fiddle/violin making is something very traditional and one will have to bow to that fact to have success with the players. But I think I learned better by doing mistakes and learning from them, than I would have learned if I should have followed some other maker slavishly, being told "this works - this don't work", and probably not always get a good answer why. (Grrr.. we're all different.)

I do it by eye .. and see what happens!

I think .. "darker" is too undefined. But why would low density wood for the back give a darker sound. In my experience it don't.

No need to build an iglo.

Have you done any adjustments between these measurements or is it still the origial setup?

I put a small drop of water at the edges of the table (where Davids paper are). I do that to swell any possible compressed wood there. But if I cut the lenght (width) of the saddle and glue it in while the spruce is still moist, there will be a tiny gap at each side after the spruce has dried.

At the other end of the scale .. hmm .. sort of, is a book I read long ago, from Sweden. I've forgotten the name (and I don't worry). He claimed that the best Cremonese makers were utterly pedantic people and every part of the instrument should sound C#. Even when you tapped on one peg you should hear C#.

... I've made 200 instruments ... some with reasonable success ... confusion continues ...

You will need make a channeled fingerboard for the sympathetic strings. So you will take away a good part of the ebony and this will make the fingerboard lighter. I don't think solid ebony need to be negative for sound.

I'm not able to make a nice enough graph from these clips to put here. But from what I get on my computer I see that the high output between 1000Hz and 1500Hz that my knocking test, with a small hammer to the side of the bridge top gives, is gone when the fiddle is played. And these fiddles don't sound particularly nasal to me.. I would love to have someone comment on this, 'cause I might be able to improve my knocking tests? (The first post/graph in this thread is from knocking.)

Stavanger, I put a link into the post above. Availability could have been a factor for the early makers. But a more modern maker like Gunnar Røstad used alder a lot to. I'm sure that was because he liked it because he also bought german wood like most of us do today. The clips are taken from Folkemusikktimen 2. july this year. You can hear it here: NRK. Folkemusikktimen.