Urban Luthier

love it! your edge work is stunning

Nice colour on the sample above! The varnishing chapter in Hargrave's bass book talks about his french polishing technique. For my part i'm developing a workflow that allows me to leave the final surface unpolished with a little bit of texture

All of this will be on the poster. It is worth purchasing a couple of the strad posters - Titian, Huberman, Viewtemps, Brusilow are good ones with CT scans. The Dancla is a good poster also but the violin in HUGE.

The Viewtemps has the rib outline included in the poster

If you are just star If you are just starting out, personally I'd only use the Strad form drawings as a reference. The hardest thing to get right (for me at least) is the corner shapes -- if you follow the stard froms accurately you'll wind up with an outline with corners that look tighter than what we see in finished instruments. Fortunately the Strad has some great posters with full size CT scans of the rib garland. You can trace it and use it for your template (correcting symmetry or not depending what is important for you. Although the CT is a bit fuzzy the Titan drawing is a great place to start -- it is a nice strad - not to big or too small. The other is the Huberman.

This thread might be of interest

This article may be useful https://www.roger-hargrave.de/PDF/Arching/Arching_Purfling_Edgework.pdf

brilliant idea thanks

Bending wasn't that difficult -- bending to the right shape and gluing with one pair of hands was a challenge!

Hi E thx. ribs are 1.6mm a tad less in the c bouts

ha not too scary but a couple of other things I found challenging... Working in a small space is really difficult -- one needs a bit of elbow room around the bending iron to work efficiently -- kind of hard in a 8 x 8 ft shop. I can barley fit a Cello on my bench! I found it easier to fit the ribs with the form secured in the tail vice so the form rested at a 90 degrees angle to the bench - easy for the first 5 ribs - kind of hard for the las one! I had to work really fast when gluing. Because the ribs are thin and cover a large surface area - i found if i used too much glue, I got a bit of warping even before the clamp was secured. I used a hair dryer on the highest setting to warm the parts before gluing and this really helped also one more thing - i cut the blocks with a gouge and rasp and for the most part left things fairly rough - I think the texture helped with gluing. I made this sanding thing in the shape of a bending iron -- a few passes with this really helped keep the corner bits that meet the form and joins nice and clean.

Nice work Tets -- love the texture

Cello rib garland. First cello. The amount of effort and skill required to build a nice rib garland was much more difficult than I thought - far greater than a violin or viola. Bending the corners required basically all my strength to hold the bending strap fast around the iron to set the bend. Twisting and warping was an issue as well, even working carefully i had to correct twist throughout each bout before gluing. Lastly it took a bit of patience to get an invisible joint between the lower bouts. All and all i'm fairly pleased with the result. The curves follow the outline fairly closely.

http://www.baroquemaster.de/saitenhalter.htm. These are practical working examples of fingerboards and tail pieces, but not from any specific instrument. I wouldn't make a tailpiece out of spruce however - even with the ebony veneer it may not be strong enough

All joking aside, Jeffrey is actually our moderator not the site owner. The business owners of the Maestronet forum and servers are based in Toronto. Sadly if Maestronet closes shop (which I don't think it will any time soon as it is an easy source of income for the owners) Jeffrey's posts will disappear along with everyone else