Brad Dorsey

Roman Tellers were commercially mass-produced instruments. Yours appears to be a better grade in excellent condition. I'm guessing its value would be something like $500 to $1000, depending on sound quality and if you can find someone who likes it.

It's a nickel mounted, non-Pernambuco bow. Frogs with this type of metal-lined pearl slide are often said to be Bausch shop products. We would have a better chance of reading the stamp if you showed a close-up picture of it properly oriented.

If I understand what you mean by "print-thru of the bar on the top," the bar can "print-thru" along its entire length. How does one cleat avoid this?

I fit the bass bar to the top. Then I glued and trimmed the cleats. Now I have to fit the bar over the cleats. I've done this once or twice before many years ago. I remember it being challenging to cut away the bar enough to fit over the cleats while not cutting it away too much. I also remember being told that the bar should be fit over the cleats with small gaps between the bar and the cleats because the cleats will swell when glue is applied, and the swollen cleats will hold the bar off the top without the gaps. Does anyone have any tricks for make fitting the bar over the cleats easier?

With a woodruff key cutter you would have curved scarf joints at the ends of the insert; with an end mill you would have end-grain-to-end-grain butt joints.

I've never done the repair you are asking about, so I cannot comment on how difficult or expensive it might be. But I'm pretty sure the cost would be a lot more than the commercial value of this bow. But I wonder if the frog wobble might be caused by screw mis-alignment or an over-sized inner hole rather than the worn mortice. I think these would be a lot cheaper to fix than the mortice. An archetier could tell you the exact cause of the frog wobble.

I just encountered a small problem, that I run into occasionally, while I was preparing to install a silver wire winding on a bow. There are Roman numerals incised in the butt where the winding will go. The incisions of these numerals are several times the diameter of the wire that I will use in both width and depth. This means that if I simply wound the wire over the numerals, the finished winding would have irregularities and gaps where the wire went down into the incisions. To prevent this and end up with a smooth and even finished winding I did what I always do in this situation -- I filled the incisions with a paste of superglue and Pernambuco dust. Is there any harm in doing this? What do other people do in this situation?

According to the Grunke "German Bow Makers" book: "Because of the many hands involved in making them, the workshop bows with their W. A. PFRETZSCHNER stamps and the coat of arms stamp on the frog don't follow a directly consistent pattern."

The clamp shown in the first picture that I put up would be very simple to make. It appears to be just two wood blocks clamped on the bow with bolts and wing nuts. The bow has two black wrappings on it. In addition to providing padding, these may be there to add enough to the thickness of the bow shaft to allow the blocks to clear the head, and the may be unequal in thickness to account for the taper of the shaft and allow the blocks to be parallel to each other.

Did you actually determine the load on a bow head? If so, I curious to hear what number you came up with.

It's fairly likely that the upper corner blocks are fake. It looks like original finish to me. I think the "dark discoloration...underneath the varnish in places" is antiquing that was part of the original varnish done to make the violin look older. No.

The back looks like it might have fake flame.

That reminds me of the filthy rat-infested motel that was known as The Fiddle because it was such a vile inn.

It looks like you don't have enough clearance between the top of the cross slide and the cutter. To use this lathe for spline slots, you need some sort of milling set-up that will attach to the T slot in the cross slide and hang off the left side of the cross slide low enough to give you enough clearance. One possibility is shown most clearly in the third picture I posted above.

You have to hold the bow. But f you mean holding it in your hands, this would be risking disaster, and you would get a ragged cut at best. I have not yet managed to get my lathe set up for sawing a spline slot in a bow head. I've been doing it on my drill press for about 25 years. I put up some pictures of my drill press set-up on this forum here: https://maestronet.com/forum/index.php?/topic/316831-drill-press-set-up-for-cutting-bow-head-spline-slot/ And here's another Maestronet bow spline discussion. Be sure to click the link to Josh Henry's method. https://maestronet.com/forum/index.php?/topic/322898-bow-head-repair/