Brad Dorsey

The only reason to take the fingerboard off is to shave the neck down. It would have been easier to make the fingerboard thinner if you had left it on.

Would you do that by altering the neck or the fingerboard or both?

Yes.

Yes.

...whether you mean the back of a violin or the heel plate of a bow frog. Now I know you mean a violin back, but when I read your title I thought you meant a frog heel plate.

Having rehaired a number of these, I know that this is not worth rehairing.

Right. Shunyata: Do you understand that "projection" does not mean the height of the fingerboard above the top at the end of the fingerboard? It means the height above the top of the line of the top of the center of the fingerboard projected to the bridge position.

This violin is not worth fixing.

But don't make the same mistake I made by buying it.

Moses Tewksbury was born in 1787 and he died in 1860. According to Wenberg, he worked in Chester, New Hampshire, in the 1830s through the 1850s. His working methods were typical of early New England makers. According to Darcy Kuronen, curator of musical instruments at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, "Most of the few luthiers active in New England before the mid-nineteenth century were apparently self-taught, and probably had little opportunity to examine well-made European instruments. But they likely had access to older examples of string instruments that had yet to be modernized, and presumably adopted their assembly techniques from these models...These archaic features are easily observed in the numerous surviving bass viols from New England...New England instruments (especially bass viols) often contain a bass bar placed at a more pronounced angle...Few surviving instruments by [Moses] Tewksbury are known, but among these are three bass viols...[1832, 1832 & 1844]...a double bass...[circa 1835]…[and two violins, 1840 & 1853]" (From the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, Volume XXVIII, 2002.)

Henry Strobel's "Useful Measurements for Violin Makers" contains just what its title implies. It is a great basic reference and not terribly expensive.

Unhappy childhood?

No. The grain runs from end to end. Wood shrinks very little along the grain, but any shrinkage along the grain would make them shorter, not oval.

The only way you can be sure of getting a violin that sounds better than your present one is to hear it before you buy it.

A nice violin to play.