Mark Norfleet

I'm not so sure about that! He may be mellowing (or was out of town...), but I expected him to comment much sooner than he did.

There's pretty clear evidence that the tops of some, I think usually English, violas da gamba were made with at least one bent section. I'm not aware of any cellos that were.

I have 2 LN 102 planes, one modified for planing the curved surfaces of fingerboards. I also have a Stanley 60 1/2. The only time I use it is when I have a need to do something that might be abusive to the 102 I normally use, like when there's sand imbedded in the bottom a door I want to adjust. Yes there are issues with the Stanley adjustment features, but when it was my regular use plane for several years I simply used it and didn't fret about improving aspects of it that I couldn't easily. My 102s have fallen on a concrete floor a few more times than I care to think of, and to my amazement have not cracked. You do have to be careful to get the angle of the edge of the 102 blade pretty close to square since there isn't much wiggle room. I have never missed having an adjustable throat.

I would suggest having a look at the instruments they play before doing so. That will give you a decent idea about how carefully they handle instruments. Also, I don’t personally think that an instrument not being played is a bad thing. It saves wear and tear and I don’t believe the popular opinion that the sound suffers when not being played. Apart from my own mentioned above, I’ve known a few instruments that were not played for decades, or possibly longer, which sounded well when returned to active duty. Mine of course is the only one I had any experience of before it was stored.

Or just sticking a piece of string in there works. So long as the ends aren’t too long, it’s unlikely to buzz.

No!

But this tailpiece shows no signs of cracking... I'm not sure that your prior traumatic experience should influence what Renegade does with this one. Any tailpiece can fail at any time! It would be easy to glue a small piece of wood or bone to the underside to create a "threshold". I've had early style tailpieces buzz between the gut and the TP which did not have a threshold. And of course modern tailpieces with through holes buzz all the time. If one was really concerned about catastrophic failure, it's pretty easy to glue a thin strip of carbon fiber to the underside of the TP in the areas of concern to reinforce it in order to use the original. I've used this method successfully to keep cracking fancy tailpieces going with zero failures or signs of additional stress.

Having seen the work of many beavers, I do believe that their teeth are much sharper than the tools used to remove wood from the inside of this instrument.

Yes, but tune it once in a while if you can in case there a big humidity change so your pegs don’t become stuck. one of my violins spent 30 years in an unheated horse barn in Michigan. Besides a few open seams, it was fine. Best of luck with your recovery!!!

And just what "brand of weird" are you Jerry?

Exactly. Thanks for writing what I didn’t have the time to at the moment.

Are what looks like openings really open? On many instruments there can be some joints that look open for many reasons, but are still glued firmly. Doing what Doug suggests is fine and safe too. Use thinned glue and be sure to clean off all the excess. Don’t clamp hard and apply pressure at the purfling if you use more than slight clamping pressure.

Mine are similar. .1 to .15mm.

I do what I can to keep my distance from imaginary rulers.

How does one measure imagination?