You Can Make a "Stradivarius" Violin

[Quadibloc]

Visited the platetuning.org site, looked through it more closely.

It mentioned the book 'You Can Make a "Stradivarius" Violin' by Joseph Reid as a book which would cause a luthier to "toss his toys out of his crib".

I can't see why. This book is obviously not intended to be like Sacconi, or like Patrick Kreit's book, or Vigordchik's. It was published by Popular Mechanics Press.

Thus, clearly, it's aimed at the amateur woodworker, and its goal is simply to describe how to make a violin of the Stradivarius pattern, without any pretensions that the result would be better than a student violin. (Of course, it may have gotten how to do even that wrong.)

Speaking of books, while there was a book published about William Fry, as far as I know, he never wrote a book describing his theories and methods. But I've seen statements to the effect that he did put them down in writing.

[Marty Kasprzyk]

I have the book "You Can Make a "Stradivarius violin" you mentioned.  So I made one with no problem and I don't understand what's all the fuss about.  There must be some more difficult challenges out there.

[TimRobinson]

You could learn the flute...

 

[Andreas Preuss]

soon you will find a new publication by the same author:

'You can make a Guarnerius violin, too!

[The Violin Beautiful]

My grandfather had that book in his library. Even though he had plenty of “better” books, he always appreciated the no-nonsense approach to making for the novice.   One could do far worse!