A432

They made the plates too thick because the retailers (and wholesalers) who sold them didn't want them coming back for replacement with cracks.

1) re. my followup posting (attempt) yesterday: thank you for the compliment. "To silence a man is to pay him homage, for it is an acknowledgement that his arguments are both impossible to answer and impossible to ignore." -- JBR Yant 2) @Shunyata: Yehudi Menuhin used to do that too. (Not unsubatantiated gossip-- I've watched him do it). 1733 Strads appreciate rest breaks : ) The great authorities here will probably dismiss this as merely one of his flaky eccentricities like yoga. But he had (at that point) lived with that fiddle for 30 years, and knew it a little better than the theorists with superior knowledge. (You know, the kind that refutes mere experience).

You're going to get the usual dogmas and gospel messages on this from people conditioned to regard every practical question as an abstract proposition subject to logical deducti9n. FWIW, Sacconi was one such, insisting that "playing in" a repaired/disused fiddle was a kind of musical urban legend. (His student) Hans N, on the other hand, approached it empirically, back before he stopped acceoting repair/restoration work from private clients. He had a neighbor, an excellent violinist, who worked steadily in Broadway pit orchestras. Whenever a restoration job was finished, his neighbor played it at work until it was back up to snuff. Only then, at its best, was it returned to its owner. The reputation Hans enjoyed among musicians for doing repair work that never needed playing back in again bordered on awe.

Benjamin Hebbert has posted a relevant and interesting quotation bearing on this point in his description of the Widhalm violin he's offering (violins, page 2). FWIW, I agree completely.

Q & A Q: How many fiddle-fixers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Good news and bad news. The good news is, when he's done, only a real expert would ever suspect it's a replacement and not the original bulb. The bad news is, he'll only work on it when he's in the right mood, so don't hold your breath waiting for it to be finished.

If the cutting edge were turred up (toward the bevel) instead of down it would skate over the surface instead of biting in. The actual deviation of the turned edge is probably less than 1 % -- just enough to pull the edge of the curl up where it jams against the sole. Forward propulsion after that forces the uniformly thin curl thus produced up into the throat and away. Just stop trying to model it and try it instead. On this end, it's like people obsessing over whether rosin is necessary on bow hair to generate sound when it's so freaking easy to just try it and see, model or no model.

PS (since i can't edit): 404 (not 401) Overlook small screen wide fingers typos Close concluding parenthesis.

Nathan -- Tried to PM you yesterday, but couldn't get your name typed into the send-to box. Then wrote a l9ng-ish response to post here but it apparently timed out -- got the usual "Your post must be approved by an administrator" response, but the text tield was empty & it never posted. There was an ADHD hyperfocused-with-aspergers-sauce loner there who told outrrageously inappropriate (in mixed company) jokes & turned Bill's 1982 bow's road test into a three hour ConcertoFest. That was yours truly. Having refused any involvement with social media (facebook, twitter, linked in et al.), a name search would only get a 401 result anyhow. Glad you've managed to combine luthiery with living in a place fit for human beings (those years here were spent working in a violin shop -- & freelancing -- in a major metropolitan area that's gotten even more toxic since then. Cheers & Regards

Cleaning up loose ends, whether it makes any sense (is congruent with a conceptual blueprint) or not, it simply works, needing no justification beyond that (although 225 years of practice in France should suffice). The blade edge is mounted bevel side up (the usual way) the edge-turned down.

The smart way to secure whalebone/baleen lapping (not that you're ever going to use it fresh,but in restoration) is tp paint the area under it with shella, & wrap while it's still sticky. Which might, or might not be directly relevant to silk/tinsel lapping. And to the extent that it's necessary to cite some authority in order to know anything, in this case Bill Watson via Brian Tunnnicliffe.

The edge turns strongly, down away from the body of the plane. I used 220 grit emory paper and leaned into it. Or, imagine your fingers held together like a downward angle salute are the blade. Curling the last digits down further would model what's involved. Start with no "bite" at all. Tap the nose gently and try 10 strokes. If no curl is pulled, another tap-&-try. You reach the point where the third or fourth pass is starting to pull a paper thin curl, shaving through irregularities, knots &c as easily as slicing balogna with a deli slicer. That's your working blade protrusion. (A little further for early stage roughing out work, to save time and joint strain).No blade angle modification is needed. Later stage finishing planes, small in size, have higher-angled bits, but they still cut -- not scrape. You would only run into tear-out if the blade were sticking out way too far. At least that's what I found, and what you can see on older, gnarlly-grained French bows. Which were definitely planed. FWIW

Odd -- I posted a followup note to the above but it disappeared. In short, planing pernambucco & ebony with an un-modidied (low blade angle)102 (& using other edge tools on them) for months without edge maintinance was normal back when I was doing it. Salchow said that Ouchard's own tools "looked like sh*t (no careful treatment). But they worked, which was all he cared about. Scraper planes would probably be a different story.

People in Anglo-World, at least, believed that Retford was correct when said (in the book he wrote) that planes like the Stanley 102 had no place in bowmaking. It turned out though that, as Bill Salchow said (BS spent a year learning bowmaking in Mericourt, with a finishing stint in Ouchard's shop), planes like the general 102 type were, in his words, "the workhorse of the French bowmaker." When you attended one of his summer courses @ UNH (I logged four weeks with him at these, 1981 & 1982 sessions) you brought your own -- the other tools (knives and chisels) had had for sale. What the English apparently hadn't known was that the key to planing pernambucco was to strongly turn the edges of the plane blades/chisels used (ditto ebony). However counter-intuitive this might see, it works, and works like a charm. Whether this is the case in violinmaking, the violinmakers here can say.

J. Dilisio's and example three look like the Brandt model. Which is, IMHO, ideal.

Am I the only one here whose pdf icon says "unavailable"?