Dimitri Musafia

I can't imagine how anyone born in Corsica could become a violin maker, if to do so requires a background if not in the craft, at least in music or a conception of the such. Corsica was in the period rather poor and rural, neglected as it was even by Napoleon who was born there. Only in recent times, with tourism, are things looking up. An excellent reason to leave, but to get into lutherie? I'm curious.

Thank you, Anna. I'll contact these people and see if they can provide the type of product my clients need. The geo-fencing is clever, my tracker has it as well, but it is impractical if you are travelling. Imagine stopping for a sandwich at a tube station, and having to spend a half hour programming the lat/lon of your geo-fence! You'll end up not doing it, or being distracted WHILE doing it, and then... hey, where's my Strad?? Personally I prefer the concept of trackers which are not built into the cases, which get charged when they are outside. Built-in trackers are first of all much more expensive to offer, they cannot be switched from case to case, and then once obsolete (which happens quickly these days, as my original post points out) they become a liability.

Hello everyone, I've been providing GPS trackers with my cases for some time now. They's small (half the size of a pack of cigarettes), have a motion sensor, and the rechargeable battery has a 100h+ standby time. Being a stand-alone unit it doesn't depend on a company providing you with the tracking service, so there is no monthly charge. You just buy a pre-paid SIM card and you're ready to go. The problem is, like all other similar devices I've found thus far, they operate with the GSM/GPRS 2G network, which unfortunately is gradually being phased out. In Korea, for example, 2G service is no longer available at all. Does anyone know of similar devices available that work at least on 4G? Thanks in advance...

Art Linkletter... wow, those were the days... lots of hazy memories, all in black-and-white...

If that's what it takes, I'm all for it :-) !

Thank you for the suggestion, but I prefer to re-create real-world scenarios as much as possible, in other words working with actual violin cases.

Hah! Didn't think of that... hmmmm.... how about a test with steam?

RE possible passage of moisture through wood laminate case shells during solar exposure Someone had asked if it were possible for moisture to pass through wood laminate, which as is noted is a number of wooden plies with glue uniformly distributed in between. So I just performed an experiment in which 40ml of water were poured onto the inside of the lid of a wood laminate case shell and left there to see what would happen. Note that the inside of the wood was unfinished (i.e. no lining, no glue to block the passage of moisture). Ambient temp 24°C, RH 60- 65%. Test starting time 9.50 AM. The water stagnated for a while, partially absorbed by the first layer of laminate while it spread via the capillary effect, and a little of it did eventually seep through the joinery between the lid panel and the sidewall (again less glue was present there than normal). Even though there was standing water for over an hour, none of it passed through the laminate itself, and by 14.50 (5 hours later) the shell was dry to the touch. Although this test was not performed at high temperatures, I think it would be safe to rule out measureable quantities of any kind of absorbed or adsorbed moisture passing through the structure of the case shell itself during solar exposure tests owing to porosity of the material, to the point of causing the observed abrupt changes in RH within the case. Any comments?

...and not a single drop of Italian blood!

That's a tough one, considering how complex the surfaces are. Reason for which while not sleeping last night, I thought of preparing a special case for a solar radiation test. Usual shell, usual cover, but NO interior at all. Just empty space. I'd waterproof the interior surfaces to minimize both moisture adsorbtion and absorbtion and have the added benefit of being able to actually calculate the air volume and thus the kg. of air inside. A barometric sensor would be included. Then I'd put it to the overheating tests like I've done in the past (along with a completed case for comparison) and chart the outcome. The results should help define some of the aspects of the issues we have been discussing. Any comments or suggestions?

Relativity, my dear David! :-)

Good idea. Tomorrow I'll take 1.5 square meters of silk plush (the average amount that goes into a violin case) and weigh it on my precision electronic scale (+/-2 g). The I'll put it away and weigh it periodically. I will hang it outdoors in the sun, and take it home with me and hang it in my bathroom when I take a shower, and whatever else I can think of. I'll post the results here. Adsorbtion, you better watch out now...

On a slightly different note, since someone already brought up Occam, I'd like to add this personal anecdote. My dad was a friend of Sir Karl Popper (the unimpressed of you can look him up). In one of their last conversations (Popper died in '94) they discussed problem solving. Popper explained how once you resolve a problem (call it P1), you immediately create a new one (P2). Resolving that one, a new one appears (P3). My dad asked rhetorically: "well, if resolving problems creates unending problems, why even bother?" Popper: "Because it's interesting". :-)

It would be interesting to see how much water vapor (expressed in grams) a given material can adsorb per square meter, and then cross this with the water vapor that a kg. of air can hold at a given temperature, and THEN see how much it can influence RH inside the case during overheating. According to the table I copy-pasted above, just to maintain the same RH 50% between 20°C and 50°C (not too much different from the graphs I posted above) if I'm not mistaken the adsorbing phenomenon would have had to release 37g of water vapor per kg of air. Is this possible? To put this in persepective, I weigh each case completed in my atelier, in January as in July, when RH in the atelier is much different. The tolerance I have noted is +/-5% with no seasonal maximum.

But wouldn't adsorbtion require a much higher RH value in order to take place, like 70% or 80%? These graphs show internal RH starting points as low as 43%, which is borderline dry - at this level wouldn't the moisture eventually adsorbed be released into the case interior even at room temperature?