Scroll graft instructions?

[polkat]

I'm about to try my first scroll graft on a violin I made a few years back. It was lent to a friend and the story I got was that the scroll/pegbox was crushed under a car tire (my friendship with this person is now under scrutiny!). Anyway, there's enough of the nut end of the pegbox to do a French type graft (the rest of the box/scroll is history). I have practiced this on a few cheap Chinese necks with some success, and I also have a nice scroll/box with closely matching wood from a broken neck to use for this. But before I go for it, are there any websites that give instructions such as measuring the cutting angles...etc? I can't afford any books on the subject right now. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Berl Mendenhall]

Polkat,

Andrew Carruthers, had a series of photos on his web site on neck grafting.

Berl

[Brad Dorsey]

"Anyway, there's enough of the nut end of the pegbox to do a French type graft (the rest of the box/scroll is history)."

If most of the scroll and pegbox are destroyed, I don't understand what it is you are grafting. Normally the scroll and pegbox are preserved to be grafted onto a replacement neck. If they are destroyed, it might make more sense for you to make a new neck/scroll.

Carruthers does have a nice photo sequence of the neck graft procedure at:

http://www.andrewcarruthers.com/Workshop/N...0neck/index.htm

[polkat]

I have a scroll/pegbox from a neck I made for another violin that ended up being too short in neck length. It was something I made when I was just starting and the scroll/pegbox is good. I want to graft this to the good violin with the crushed scroll. Since I made them both, and both scrolls were very similar in look and dimension, I have no quams about grafting them together.

I checked out Anderw's site and the pictures are very nice. My main concern is getting the angles on both box cheeks and the heel as close as possible to each other. I thought maybe there was a way of measuring and marking, but I don't see this in the images.

[Brad Dorsey]

"I have a scroll/pegbox from a neck I made for another violin that ended up being too short in neck length. ... I want to graft this to the good violin with the crushed scroll."

The problem with your plan to graft a scroll onto a finished neck is that you have no room for error or adjustment. If the graft isn't done to give you exactly the right neck length, and with all the alignments perfect, you have no extra wood to make corrections.

I think you should graft your good scroll to an unfinished neck graft block, as shown in Carruthers' pictures. After doing this, you have extra wood in the graft block to make sure the neck length, and all the other measurements and alignments, come out right.

"My main concern is getting the angles on both box cheeks and the heel as close as possible to each other."

It's nice to have the angles equal for the sake of symmetry, but there's no functional reason for them to be so. On old violins, one side of the pegbox is often worn away by contact with players' hands. In this case, the graft procedure can cut away more of the pegbox on one side than on the other to replace the wood that has been worn away.