Nick Allen

It's nice to have good bridge wood in hand. Stuff from the commercial dudes is so unpredictable that it can be discouraging at times. Like a De Luxe blank with grain lines that are 4mm apart, and wood made of sponge cake is the stuff I've been dealing with lol. Im very partial to the British style cut and most blanks don't leave enough wood at almost any point to do that. Ugh.. I might try Korolia. They seem to be pretty good these days.

Look at that. A work of art. Perfectly cut.

All I see is a mound of varnish at the edges of the feet. There's no way that the feet are just "hovering" above the top like that. Plus, the rest of the ankles and whatnot look okay to me. Bridge feet do this to tops all of the time, we've all seen it a billion times, especially with freshly oil varnished instruments. I wouldn't send a fiddle back if the varnish sticks to the feet so long as the feet are in the correct spot relative to the bass bar and center line. If the strings go over the FB weirdly, one can just cut a new tilted bridge.

Could anyone here suggest a cut style that will allow for pretty much any finished bridge style? I'm so used to using the Aubert, but the blank cut is bollocks. MS bridges being pricy, I don't want to experiment too much...

I use the veritas carving knife. I like the metal components, as it helps "drive" my cut, and eliminate chatter and whatnot. https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/tools/hand-tools/carving-tools/knives/31088-veritas-carvers-knife I use the bullet shaped blade for the bulk of the work, and the very fine straight blade for the corners. The hooked ones I pretty much just throw away. The handle even has a little plug in the end that has a magnet so you can store the blades that you are using.

Most of the sound post patches I've put in this far have been on instruments that developed them without any accident or visible signs of trauma. Just my 2¢, though.

I'd say that this is closer to the truth. I don't think it's necessarily a matter of them being taken care of or not, but rather probably from weather, wood age and soundpost put in too tight.

For starters Stainer's labels were always hand written.

Yeah. You insert a row of soundpost that level the crack while you clamp it from the sides while the top is still on.

Absolutely. Theoretically you could do it with the top still on, but that would be unreasonably tedious and would involve sound post towers and inserting cleats in through the f holes, which would take a considerable amount of skill and patience to do.

You might be able to scrape that off.

I really love your work! Especially your red-brown varnish that has so much depth and luster. Weird question, though. What is the make of that bridge blank in the picture with the holder? I really dig the cut of the blank.

On new pegs? If you're building new, or installing a fresh set, I go with slightly off-center towards the head. It makes it so the hole isn't super close to the narrow end wall once the pegs compress and end up pushing in a couple of mm after a few weeks.

Looks pretty good to me. Certainly better than my first.

You can just spray glue some 80 grit to a sheet of melamine and move on with your life after 5 minutes. I got 2 rib assemblies flattened and tapered in under ten minutes the other day. For the taper on the upper blocks to the neck block, just put a ruler down and ride the Garland on that for a few strokes and voíla.