Muswell

I found some art chalk sticks, sold as a pack of one white and one black, which were very expensive but have none of the grittiness of blackboard chalk. I have found it to be perfect for fitting bass bars.

How about this?

I played the lute for many years and actually never bothered to play from notation. The tabulature is very easy to read and takes away any need to work out where on the fingerboard you should play something. The only snags were that some of the facsimiles were very hard to read because someone had tried to squash as much music as possible onto a sheet, and there were 2 systems. One of these had the highest pitched notes on the top line and the other had them on the bottom.

When I made my first violin I made a stupid mistake on one of the pegholes. After research on MN I did a bushing with brown paper and Titebond. It worked fine and wasn't hard to do after a bit of easily reversible practice.It looks OK too, certainly good enough for a beater.

It was obviously the length of the sausage that was in the larder.

Probably not, because nothing is idiot-proof, idiot-resistant is a better term

I think it's fairly well established that depending on how much time you are exposed and how loud you play you can suffer some hearing loss, especially the left ear. I suppose some people are more susceptible than others. I do a lot of my practice using a practice mute in order to reduce the overall exposure and have Elacin earplugs with 10 dB attentuation for loud orchestral music.

I concluded that by the time you have finished messing around with chemicals, getting rid of the crud and then scraping to tidy up it was better just to scrape the varnish off. Healthier too.

I've just been watching the video of Alina Ibragimova playing the Bach Chaconne at the Proms. Someone should tell her about her elbow problem.

Yes!

I remember, many moons ago, watching someone in the Netherlands making clogs. At impressive speed he carved a pair of clogs, just by eye, which were effectively identical....that was his job. No big deal.

Is there a problem with the Joha products? I've been using Old Wood but it's a bit spendy and the finish coats seem to wear quickly up near the neck. So, I thought I might try something else.

Thanks, that makes more sense now.

Your violin looks very nice. You said that you used golden brown, red brown and dark brown varnish and then colour washes. I am thinking about trying the Joha varnish myself and was wondering what the colour was like before the colour glaze and whether you would go through the same combination of varnishes if you did it again.

I was once playing in an ensemble when the tail gut failed on one of the violas. That was really dramatic.