MIMF

I have no personal experience with this wood, but the information i can find about it suggests that it has about the same weight and hardness as ebony, but with a high oil content, and silica particles. http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/cumaru/ The data on this site sugges...

Figured katalox

Thanks for the source, interesting read. It seems to suggest that uniform growth is more important than the actual width of the growth rings when it comes to acoustical properties. I know that wood is very variable, and that every piece is different, i just wanted to find out if there has been any e...

I have seen countless people claim that tighter grain wood is stronger than wider grain wood, and that wide grained conifers are practicaly useless as musical instrument wood. Is there any scientific evidence to back these claims up? Has anyone tested large samples of wood of the same species, with ...

Acoustically there is no difference assuming you remove about the same amount of material. Edit: I have seen very few violinmakers claim that scraping makes a difference to the sound, it does however give a slightly different look, depending on how you use it. When scraping a spruce top with a somew...

Gluing in a hardwood dowel should work, this repair is sometimes used on electric guitars if the strap buttons rip out of the wood. I would not do a mixture of glue and woodchips, since the screw will be subjected to alot of tension, and in most cases using glue as a filler is not good for structura...

Bob Benedetto has made a complete guitar out of western red cedar, top, back, sides and neck, i think it is called the Sinfonietta Western Red Cedar. He mentions in his book that he normaly uses solid crossgrain spruce braces to reinforce the sides of most of his guitars. This is an archtop guitar s...

Beautiful guitar, i like the tailpiece design, and the clean look without binding.

I cannot say for sure whether the ribs where thinned before they where bent or bent at full thickness and then later scraped thinner, as this would only be speculation and i have no proof for either of them. Roger Hargrave suggests that del gesu might not have had the best method, or tools for the r...

With great respect, I would need to see that verified. Ribs less than half a millimeter in a violin would never be intentional......but a mistake. Consider that 0.5 mm is just 500 microns or the thickness of 5 human hairs. The source of this information is Roger Hargrave's pdf book on his site http...

Some of it has to do with ease of bending, alot of highly flamed european maple suddenly becomes alot easier to bend once you get below 1.5mm thickness, in some of the Guarneri del gesu violins the rib thickness goes under 0.5mm in the tightest curves of the c-bouts where the ribs are glued to the c...