Urban Luthier

Good luck with the Exhibit Guy - wish i could be there to see you guys again - the last one was a fantastic meetup

Last go I linked x20w UV bulbs end to end and - 3ft total. I use a grow tent with a reflective interior. i hung the violin with a string attached to a peg which was suspended from a cheep slow speed synchronous motor bolted to the top of the tent. This allows the violin to rotate once every minute or so in-front of the UV bulbs. Varnish dried in 24 hrs. Since my grow tent is large, the temperature never really got above 25-26 degrees Celsius. I learned the hard way - if you use a varnish with a long open time (4-5 hrs) a drying cabinet that is too hot can cause the varnish to move around before it starts to set

Beautiful Joe!

Finally downloaded - Great article Eric thank you for sharing.

Few final photos before it goes to its new home.

Impressive!

thank you both! image of the tailpiece and tie off

... or you can wait until you've done the first turn and clean the throat out then. (with either a flat gouge as Jacob mentioned, thin knife or a needle rasp.

The archinto viola is one of the most beautiful things I've seen

Think this is a viola d'amore converted to a viola by JVB with a nice Amati head with blackened chamfers to boot! Nice photos in the strad varnish book. you can hear it on this recording

thanks for your update - I'm interested in LEDs to replace my CFL tubes for varnish curing and tanning. can anyone recommend commercially available LEDs they have tried that work?

I should have been more clear - yes 3d printing is limited (you use to be able to print directly to a 3d printer hooked up to you computer) But also note if you plan to use fusion as a drawing tool (the main use for me at least) one can't export 2D drawings as PDFs with the enthusiast licence. You can print a single sheet apparently but I haven't tried it. I usually export a dxf from fusion and bring it into ACAD to create PDFs

Autodesk Fusion is a good one to start with. It is free to use as an enthusiast - however to print anything you'll need to cough up for a subscription. The enthusiasts licences is a good way to go to figure things out and then pay for a single month if you need to do some printing I'm lucky - I sat across from the team who implemented the g-code sectioning and UI into Fusion when I worked at ADSK.

including guitar makers

I see Jacob got to the heart of it - but read Hargrave's del Gesu book on his site. Violins necks were nailed to the rib garland before the body outline was made. To take the body outline, the rib garland was attached to the back through the locating pins. This allows the neck to pivot to match the centre line of the back before the outline is scribed. Whether the locating pins were used or not, it is the pivot or twist that Jacob mentions above that causes the asymmetry - you can see this in every Strad poster - one bout will be higher than the other.