Marty Kasprzyk

I fill the wood pores with the same oil finish as the final coat finish so there is no index of refraction mismatch. The first few very light applications are done with a cloth pad which is just a little damp so that there is not enough to soak far into the wood pores.

Pegs should be located so cracks happen only at the A string peg to make it standardized.

What does it sound like?

If you use enough circles you can duplicate the true ellipse shape just like you can duplicate the violin's shape.

Selecting the best distance between the reflecting surface and the top plate is an interesting acoustics problem.

What's the back made out of? It would be an interesting experiment to compare the sound spectrum with and without the back. If the back is lighter than the top frying pan top I suggest you reverse everything and put the frying pan on the bottom cup-up in the traditional cooking direction.

How does it sound?

One measure of glue strength could be the weight of the spruce splinters left on the ribs after the top is removed.

I liked seeing the time period when none of our modern conveniences existed. It's good to see what the world is headed for again.

What was the top plate's weight?

Great series but were any of them discussing wine?

Sebastian Gonzalez (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sebastian-Gonzalez-93#:~:text=Violin making is perhaps one,in a traditional master-apprentice format.) made a presentation for the March 6, 2026 Acoustics Workshop topic in which he discusses the effects of the violin's arch. He modeled his arch shape with the equation y= (1-x^2)^2 where y is the arch height scaled to equal 1 at the maximum height and x is the width of half of the bout width scaled to equal 1 at the maximum distance from the center line. I plotted his equation and got a nice smooth arch shape with a curve reversal inflection point but the plot (red line) seems to be a more slender cross arch than often seen. So I tried several different exponents n for the equation y = (1-X^2)^n: n= 2, 1.75, 1.5, 1.25 and 1 This made the curves more bulgy and moved the inflection point nearer the plate's channel. I also tried a different equation y = (1-x^3)^n also with different exponents n and found the curves were even more bulgy and some of them from either groups seemed very similar to the wide variety of real life violins. And with some futzing or fooling around any violin shape can probably be generated mathematically. This might suggest the old violin makers simply carved their plates to whatever they thought was right and didn't waste time with this stuff.

I use Wittner pegs which grip the strings really well so you don't need a lot of wraps on the pegs. I cut an inch or two off the strings to reduce the number of wraps and the amount of peg turning needed to bring them up to pitch. I put a drop of super glue on the cut string ends to prevent the silk from fraying.

If you use a series of circle arcs to generate the f hole shapes it might be fun to have first have a betting contest where we predict how many arcs are needed.

I'm sorry for pissing you off but I have trouble accepting the idea that Carracci must have used a bunch of compass arcs and straight lines to generate his piss arc.