LCF

Nasal is a poorly defined term. I thought all cellos were supposed to sound nasal. What do you mean by it? Is the balance beteeen the strings different to how you'd like it?

If so you are using waaaaay too much. A tiny bit on the tip of cloth, rubbed on vigorously until it is rubbed off. Same concept as spit and polish and less aromatic than linseed oil. Alternatively I could repackage some in a tiny bottle for you to use sparingly as 'Rich Wax Fingerboard Polishe'.

They're hard to beat. To add to any potential controversy some polyurethanes aren't bad either. Irc @ctanzio has written about these. Varnishing mimics the other old saw: 1%varnish, 99% application.

I suspect that in a hot climate like mine the combination of elemi and vit E means this would never be hard enough. I want things to oxidise and set! Some diy varnishes are very climate dependant. @Riccardo964 I suggest you read up on @Davide Sora 's spirit based varnishes. There are brilliantly clear explanations, recipes, videos. Check out various threads on 1704 (spirit) varnish too, to get a feel for the issues. Otherwise there are likely 100s of pages of vitriolic varnish discussions and theories you can wade through here on M'net.

Trad shoe polish is just a paste wax with carbon black and maybe some black aniline. That's not out of bounds for an ebony board compared to other polishes or colourants.

Interesting to compare this to your llm inspired varnish tips. You could blacken ebony with iron acetate, or even permanganate but yuck. An iron acetate or tannate method can be used to blacken strips of wood for purfling. Or to stain paler, softer woods once used for fingerboards such as pear. 'Once upon a time' the finest ebonies and ivories were the un-natural looking ones with little grain or varying colour - what we would think of as being like plastic. Nowadays we have plastic to do that job and there is an alternative æsthetic where a bit of visible grain and variation is preferable.

Step 2 seems a bit whacky to me. Maybe ok if you want to blacken whatever you're finishing. Are you making a black violin?

How thick is it? The white part is just sapwood. What does the surface look like when you plane it a little?

That's a fine looking bespoke shillelagh you've made up at the top of page 7. Arthur McBride might have coveted one like that when he had to deal with the recruiting sargeant. Here's a pic of my alleged 'Belgian' stone. It was deeply curved from many years honing of cut throat razors which also came with it, but I flattened it out with a diamond plate. The pale side seems only slightly finer grit than the dark but this is a very heavy stone compared to eg hard Arkansas. It is dark grey and white rather than the colour in this pic.

Determinism, margins, dissipation, chaos . ... It's interesting that you should mention error in this context. Michael Levin & associates worked with models of a simple algorithm in which data didn't always cooperate or instructions were badly followed: 2401.05375] Classical Sorting Algorithms as a Model of Morphogenesis: self-sorting arrays reveal unexpected competencies in a minimal model of basal intelligence https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05375 " Levin's work breaks two traditional computational assumptions: top-down control and perfectly reliable hardware. By giving individual elements agency (the freedom to act based on local conditions), he discovered that simple algorithms do more than just sort—they exhibit side quests and cognitive complexities that emerge in the spaces between explicit rules. Key takeaways from his research include: Delayed Gratification: When faced with an obstacle, arrays sometimes unsort themselves (temporarily step backward) to eventually reach a completely sorted state. Decentralized Problem Solving: Lists can successfully sort without a central planner, even if they are a mix of competing algorithms with opposing sorting goals. Chimeric Algorithms: Numbers following entirely different algorithms—and differing opinions on the end goal—can still self-organize and resolve into a stable state." That's a google AI summary, natch. Ultimately if Michael Levin is worried about AI then so am I.

"Saint Peter's Fair": The annual fair in Shrewsbury sees townspeople clash with abbey authorities over tolls. When the curfew is ignored, a prominent visiting wine merchant is murdered, and Brother Cadfael must investigate. I'm sure there was a generous amount of quaffing in various episodes also many interesting herbs such as aconitum and digitalis. Bringing this back on topic there were lots of nice arches featured.

I don't know Fusion. My favourite 3d CAD programme is the NurBs based MOI3D which is a bit obscure but still going strong. It was put together by one of the original Rhino design team. I like it because it intentionally isn't totally and utterly bloated like most CAD software and will run on ordinary computers. The drawing variables can be accessed and manipulated by scripts of which there is a large number of user written available. Curvature can be derived from a NurBs dataset so you could start with a graphic of an arch, or a probed 3d data set of a surface, compose the curves then massage the curve data to get the curvatures. You could do the same things in the free software OpenScad but it is a bit less friendly, completely script based, and life is too short. Also I don't know if it handles NurBs without a lot of legwork. * Anyone remember Brother Cadfæl?

After a mere 50 years of carving and hacking away at arched tops and backs and cavities of various instruments I also think this. Over that time I have made some 'doozies' which I would rather not discuss although they made good kindling. I ( very much!) like David Sora's approach using simple circle based templates, and his eyes, obviously. Roger Hargrave described his reconstruction of the Cremonese arching process very well. If anything can be authoritative at this point in time I'd say this might be: Arching, Purfling & Edgework in Cremonese Instruments https://www.roger-hargrave.de/PDF/Arching/Arching_Purfling_Edgework.pdf Quoting Roger: " I like to let the final arching height develop from the arch itself. The shape of the arch and the edgework will largely be dictated by the method of working and the tools employed. No two Cremonese archings are ever the same height or shape even from the same maker in the same year; similar yes, but never the same. " As far as mathematically derived shapes are concerned, many CAD programmes, in fact the standard for various cad file vector formats, don't use Bezier curves but Non uniform rational B splines, NurBs, which are capable of representing all conical sections accurately but also going a long way beyond that to approximating freehand curves. The formulae which @Marty Kasprzyk gave above for various arch possibilities resemble simple rational splines in the sense that rational == ratios of integer powers of the variables, but NurBs are more complicated and more versatile than that. Non-uniform rational B-spline - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline " Non-rational splines or Bézier curves may approximate a circle, but they cannot represent it exactly. Rational splines can represent any conic section—including the circle—exactly. " https://youtu.be/HofbVh--LKg?si=VWSEJRFyhuYsTNmc

Those labels resemble grainy photocopies ....

Except maybe if the inserts contained the complete taper and had a smaller od than the hole through the pegbox. That could easily be arranged by (details).