MIMF

Douglas,

Looking great. What are you going to varnish it with (and what colour)?

Lovely job,

Rod

Christopher, Stradivari commonly used Poplar for the back and sides of his larger instruments, mostly 'cellos. Ruckers harpsichords were almost all cased in Poplar. Willow and Poplar may well be difficult to tell apart and are very variable, probably depending on how close to water they were growing...

Steve, Some bows have reeding where the wrapping would be on a modern bow, presumably as a gripping aid. Other bows have fluted sticks. I assume that this lightens the bow without greatly affecting the stiffness. And, for the advanced worker, some bows seem to have a reed in between the flutes. I've...

bow scraper 1.jpg bow scraper 2.jpg bow scraper 3.jpg This is a little scraper plane I made for finishing off an octagonal bow stick. The whole thing is 2 inches long with a 90 degree groove in the base and made of rosewood. The blade is made from an old hacksaw blade and the screw is a normal engi...

Spooky - Philip Brown's shop is 9 miles from me in Newbury. I did meet him once many, many years ago. Tensioning the bow by using the thumb seems to work very well when played in the overhand violin grip because you are increasing the tension on the hair and thereby the pressure to retain the the fr...

hill bow 1.jpg hill bow 2.jpg hill bow 3.jpg hill bow 4.jpg hill bow 5.jpg Here some pictures of my attempt at making a clip in style bow, based on one in the Hill collection at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, England. It doesn't show up terribly well on the photo but the front of the frog is snowp...

The only detailed information on early bows I was able to find was a couple of pages in "The Bow, it's history, manufacture and use" by Henry Saint George. Its a slim volume and now is available as a digital download (Google). It gives some clues about the hair fixing and seating for the f...

Douglas, I've got the Payn drawing but decided to copy an extant instrument. I've had a look at the Rose drawing (drawn by John Pringle in 1978) and there are spot thicknesses indicated. The drawing shows the central spine stave 3.5mm thick going to 3.0mm under the tailpiece. The rest of the belly i...

Since you mentioned bows, it's not too difficult to make a serviceable one. This is made from partridgewood and has a screwed frog. Bows seem to need to be as stiff as possible which means using dense wood. Snakewood is favoured but I reckon any fine grained timber with a specific gravity greater th...

As you can see, I favoured a fairly plain style with double purfling. I truly admire your tenacity with the purfling patterns - love is a wonderful thing (Mrs J is still waiting for her virginalls). I did persevere once for a copy of the A&H Amati viola in the Ashmolean museum. Here's a scan fro...

Douglas, no hijack - it's great to see your work. Although I made my viols a frightening number of years ago, my first one has just come back into my possession so I've taken a few pictures. It's based on the large John Rose bass in the Victoria and Albert museum in London. Sitka spruce 5 piece carv...

Thanks for the replies. I've made a couple of bass viols. The first front was made with 5 pieces of varying thickness and the second with a bent central stave - both of which seemed to work OK. There are no native softwoods in the UK suitable for instrument fronts so timber would have to be imported...

Ever since Dietrich Kessler's seminal paper on the Richard Meares viol everybody now seems to make multi-piece all bent fronts. Considering that there are several other ways to make a multi-piece front, how much other evidence, apart from the Meares viol, is there that this method is the only true w...

Jim,
Most violin e strings are plain steel, so i don't think smoothness is an issue. The rosin and the texture of the bow hair should produce a sound.
Rod

Simon, In the days when I just used maple (I started on lutes and viols) I was happy using a No.4 smoother and a 9 1/2 block plane. These didn't work for me on rosewood guitar back and sides so I use a Stanley No.80 scraper plane. I've also got a Lie Nielsen 212 which I have used on some bubinga lut...

David Dyke http://www.luthierssupplies.co.uk/ also lists Cypress.

Rod

http://www.guitartonewoods4luthiers.co. ... ent&part=5

This guy lists it. I've bought nice rosewood and spruce from him.

Rod

Hi Mark, I think the example you show is very interesting, Naor seems to have got it about right. As a lute player I would want to replicate the depth of the body so the playing position would feel similar to the "real" thing -a single central rib ought to do it, perhaps hinged so that it ...