Muswell

Have you never visited the dark side?

Aha! That proves it.

A couple of years ago I opened a case and found a lot of hairs had broken at the end where the bow tucked into the holder. That was definitely a clothes moth situation because I found the dead moth, from what I've read it's the larvae that cause the problem because the adult moths don't feed. Last year I had a problem with 2 bows which had recently been rehaired. They were in daily use and not left in the case, and each day I would find a few hairs had broken, in the same area. There was no sign of any bugs, and after a while there were no more breakages so I didn't call the person who did the rehair. When I next take the bows for rehair I'm going to ask if he's had problems reported with that batch of hair but it could be that other people,like me, have had the same experience but not felt it worth telling him. Would it be worth contacting other people who had rehairs at the same time to see if they have had breakages?

I'm very sorry to read this. I always appreciated Mike's posts.

The corners are the most difficult part of cutting the groove and have to be done by hand so when you start again why not develop the necessary skill by doing the whole thing by hand, starting with the shallowest curves? When you can do it all by hand then you could use a Dremel if you want. I don't have time pressures and do all my purfling by hand because I enjoy it and prefer the end result.

I have the Lie Nielsen version which I use occasionally use in other woodworking. I suppose that you could joint plates with it but I think it would be easier to do it the conventional way. The first obstacle is that you would have to perfectly true the faces of the boards because that is the reference. Then, the plane is short which doesn't help truing the edge. It takes a while to set the blade precisely, and after all that you might find that, with the grain you have, you really need both left and right handed planes. You could certainly get most of the way with one of these but to achieve, in the last stage of the job, the precision needed to joint violin plates I think you would need enough skill to have started from scratch using a "normal" plane. Sorry.

Yes, the RTI was the reward for my labour as garden-slave. My thumb moves around a lot, which goes with playing without a shoulder rest, but the web of the thumb position is now the default postion. I find it leads to the elbow being further out and so the fingers naturally fall straight down, especially on the G string as you go up the positions. I also find wide vibrato is easier.

I acquired a sensitive spot on the side of my thumb thanks to a rose thorn and started supporting the neck on the web of the thumb. I really liked the effect on tone production and that's the way I do it now......but I still don't sound like IP. I don't use a shoulder rest either and that influences the instrument hold.

That modelling clay is excellent. I use it for knife handles where it's nice to mould it to suit your own grip.

That's nice. Is that with the 1:4 Alchemist blend? And is it chip resistant?

Me too. I rub down lightly between coats and managed to get over the worst of the beading by not thinning and padding/brushing very carefully..... scroll and peg box were the worst because the rubbing down was not so effective. The finished varnish chips as soon as you look at it. The instrument has acquired a good tiny chips during set up, which I've never had before. I think the chip imps sneak into my workshop overnight

Well said.

I sometimes use the fourth finger, even though it's not the natural choice, because the tip is a lot smaller.

Lots of practice?

It's quite good as an overview/cross reference and has some useful lists of dimensions but it's not very detailed and I think you would struggle to make a violin with this as your only guide.