Salve Håkedal

If that's true, I'm really impressed. How old are your Michelman varnished instruments?

However perfect you wash that precipitate to remove the salt byproducts, the vulnerability of the Michelman varnish to moisture won't go away. Believe me JacksonM, I tried!! The reason is that the very core of the varnish - the metal rosinate - is in itself a salt. No longer soluble in water, but still not resistant enough to moisture. (I know I've bragged about this before: In all other aspects, I loved it. If it is not touched - at least not by my skin and by some of my customers skin, as I learned - it ages beautifully. I.e. no alligatoring. I don't antique my instrumen

Nowadays you can study lots of research that may enlighten your view on modes of the finished violin: Schleske, Strad 3d, Stoppani, Borman etc.

If you read german:

Don, that has not happened to any of the instruments that have "revisited" my shop.

When I make new instruments, I do 2 small tricks: Cut a very small chamfer at the edge of the block. When I size the block with glue, I don't go quite to the edge. If I use thin enough glue for the final gluing, it will soak into the wood where it's not sized. So there will not be glue squeezed out at the edge of the block. And the tiny slit from the chamfer will lead the opening knife in position.

As usual, Don gives a very good answer. As a hardangerfiddle maker I do pretty wild things. Of course, a hardangerfiddle is something rather different from a violin or a viola, but it might give the more narrowminded (sorry!) violin makers some perspective. It's more about resonance, with the complexity that Don writes about, than it is about levers or "force diagrams".

Reading this: ".. The resulting resin softened only very slightly with direct water contact .." makes my varnish trauma return. The Michelman resin had this defect, which was the only cause for me finally giving up on it.

If you make hardangerfiddles, you'll appreciate geared pegs, I tell you!

Is it possible that this is true only while bowing is perfectly stable? .. that when there is variances in the bow stroke, there will be transients that may be more unpredictable and out of that plane?

I use spririt varnish on my new instruments, and french polishing is part of the process. (If it's taboo, I don't care.)

I percieve shellac as harder and tougher than sandarac. Sandarac may seem hard in the raw beads. But in thin applications, I'd call it brittle, not "hard" as you did. So I believe it adds brittleness to shellac which is more coherent (tough/hard) without sandarac. Maybe "brittle" is opposite of "soft" in your vocabulary? Not in mine. (But I'm norwegian; not english.) I share your minimalism regarding ingredients. I use mastix to soften shellac. I think mastix soften the shellack without adding brittleness. Or expressed another way: it adds plyability to the shellac.

Hardening shellac with sandarac!? I guess you meant the opposite?

The following works fine with my bench and plane. It requires that the halves be planed flat before shooting the joint and that the bench is also flat.

Hi Don! I think I remember you wrote something like "why not do it right the first time?" when you started and appeared here on Maestronet. I think there were more people than me that was a little skeptic to that! :-D But your down to earth and scientifically informed attitude and knowledge has been a great resource and help for a lot of us here! In Norway we say "tusen takk" (=1000 thanks).