Christopher Jacoby

Pins in the top are a sure indication of a future crack right there...

Advert: violins so ugly you'll be glad you're born blind...

i feed a little medium CA glue into any knots.

I have THREE busted dial/pin rigs on three thickness calipers. They were in a box not properly taped up during our move, and the TWO that weren't broken hit the concrete... and broke. Looking at $100 shipped for the same Käfer dial indicator from International Violin, whom I always prefer supporting, but wondering if anyone has a lead on decent dial indicators for less. I do love to buy old things on eBay and never have them quite work right, but there should be a reliable metric dial out there somewhere, and I'm having trouble finding options. Thanks in advance!

hi Ernie-- we had the opportunity to showcase that viola at the VSA convention, if you recall, and that made the deadline more pressing.

Got the flat feet! i was speaking from my own adverse experience with a great deal of .33 and .34 spruce I used in 2008-2012 or so. Modes aside, those instruments’ lives are drastically shortened by having such light tops. A dozen of the 30-40 fiddles I made those 4 years have come back through my life, and the models with flat arches are warped and distorted beyond their years. Sunken bass effhole wings, massively open treble effholes, saddlebacked tops, etc. I do now work with spruce in the .38-.48 range happily, but the fiddles made with pronounced cross arch from that wood (and those left Sacconi numbers or thicker to boot) are still in reasonable sculptural shape in comparison! lastly, though.... some of those warped fiddles are sounding fantastic. A neck reset, an arch correction here and there, their owners are using them professionally... low density beware, and handle with an exaggeratedly strong cross arch...

time to visit in person...

I'd go the opposite. The lower density the wood, the more it needs a strong, acute cross arch and height. The denser it is, the better it can weather being low and flat...

Sara Peck is there now, yes. She does lovely work.

Tell him it is time to play the ukelele

Hi Francois! This was me with strings in my late teens and early twenties. Washing my hands well and eating more vegetables and fruit, and less beer and red meat seems the way. An incredible amount of acid used to come off my hands

violins that are very closely miked require a pre-amp or complicated compression... what you're hearing is doctored beyond what the player is hearing...

****** couldnt leave it!

the sense of unfairness in a market is always about lack of meritocracy, and this whole thread has been trying to force individuals' sense of value onto a product line which has hit the market. Hebbert's point about congestion at a certain price point is why I keep my prices pretty close to what they were ten years ago, with dozens of instruments in between-- once you hit 16-24k in the States, you are in the Deep End, swimming with serious competition from around the world, and LOTS of it. Maybe I deserve to be there, although the devil on my shoulder says I'm not ready, my purfling is shabby, my varnish is cloudy, my tone doesn't carry enough... but I don't need to compete with Meike Aupperle and Ian McWilliams and Fabienne Gauchet and Eddy Miller to get my instruments into good hands. There's less of my quality of work at 12-16k, so I've stuck there in the market. The new Hills are a smart move to take a British institution and sell it in other markets than Great Britain, it seems to me. And why take an institution as respected as W E Hill and Sons and throw them into the Deep End of the low market? That would be silly. So do the new Hill fiddles BELONG in the 30k range? Hell yes they do. Especially considering not NEW violins at that price range, but the wash of mediocre old available for what is a middling price for every tight, thick fiddle from the right city in the 20th century, or the wrong city in the 19th. Pricing them this way was well done. Ive seen two of the violins, and they are top flight. Workmanship and varnish and tone are all competing with the most expensive modern I see. Daring a market always pisses a few shoppers off.

Quit being a troll. Standing up straw surgeons to couch your ignorance of violin making is as boring as your furniture must be. We out here. We exists. And we have learned many things in our decades at the bench; not the least of which are how to spell grade 5 words like rhetorical and inefficiency. Go back under your bridge and leave the conversation to the industry.