Davide Sora

Maybe I should have put this smiley, because I agreed with your comment. discussing these small details without direct experience soon becomes a bit too "academic".

I agree, I appreciated the "pressing" questions to get to the point when the first answer was a bit too vague.

I am with you that these gimlets would be difficult to use with the back attached to the ribs, in fact I believe they fixed the neck before gluing the back, and if these were the tools they used to pre-drill the holes it would support this theory. Then, for the technical problems related to driving the nails, I would not be able to give you precise answers because I have never tried to drive a nail into a block to fix the neck. For these things, direct practice is always fundamental and enlightening, so to get an answer I refer to other people who have done it.

Hi Steve, nice long and in-depth interview, very interesting, thanks for sharing.

Hi Joe, when you say "freeze", do you mean putting it in the regular refrigerator (about +4°C) or in the freezer (about -20°C)?

I have not seen any mark that could suggest holes drilled with the ribs on the form, it is one of the reasons why I think that the nails were placed with the ribs free from the form. I remember that I had looked for them because among the various theories of when the neck was fixed there was one that hypothesized that at least two nails were hammered with the form still glued to the ribs, a rather implausible theory in my opinion.

Use common sense and take your own risks. Consider that even those who support more or less reliable theories do not know everything deeply and only try to give their impressions and opinions based on their experience and feelings, no scientific dogma. Personally I think that trying only things that might have made sense even in the 1600/1700 would be a good line of thinking.

Why? To me they seem more than appropriate tools for drilling wood. Certainly very inconvenient to use for pre-drill holes in the block if you have the back already glued, but with the free ribs they seem perfectly adequate.

Yes, great pictures John, thanks for sharing. But, to get some clue, it would be useful to see how the wood of ancient instruments looks compared to that of untreated spruce. Not that I want to support ammonia treatment, but I don't think the wood of ancient instruments looks the same as that of untreated spruce. Or maybe yes? I just don't know.

I think the work you are talking about is the one done by Francesco Piasentini (TEC Eurolab CT scans) for the Messiah, I don't know if there is a video on Youtube but there is this article published on The Strad. https://www.thestrad.com/lutherie/ct-scanning-the-messiah/11554.article

These are the ones that are in the Museum among Stradivari's tools, albeit the attribution is uncertain to the Stradivari or Ceruti workshop, they certainly used something like this. Iron lengths from largest to smallest are 170mm, 74mm, 60mm and 51mm.

I agree that the asymmetries of the corners are not correlated to the way of attaching the neck. At least only marginally, the reason must be sought elsewhere, I have personally experimented and concluded that to obtain certain extreme asymmetries (one C up and one down) the neck should be so crooked that the luthier who attacked it would have to be drunk to not notice it But this does not rules out the method itself, only its correlation with asymmetries. I have always appreciated your way of investigating these aspects starting from the understanding of what existed before and how it could have evolved, it is a very logical way to try to formulate concrete and as realistic hypotheses as possible. So please do not stop, I will always be in the front row listening to your hypotheses, while always knowing that they are only theories, they always offer excellent points of comparison with our own hypotheses.

I think your system can work just as well as any other when you have the key details fine-tuned, but it seems to me that fixing the neck to the ribs before anything else is a more instinctive system (that is, closer to the way of working of the ancient Cremonese), as it allows for more last-minute adjustments. Then, everything is pure invention when trying to reconstruct working systems of which it will always be impossible to obtain objective evidence, I don't think a common agreement on how things were done can ever be found.

Happy birthday Mike, cento di questi giorni