A woman brought me her flute on which the lip plate was too small for her comfort. She asked me to build an extension onto it and to add a decoration to the side using a red wood. Beyond telling me she liked flowers, she gave me free creative reign to come up with a design.
From the pictures below you can see some of the process and the end result of this unusual and fun project!
To start, I purchased some bloodwood, which is a beautiful dark red colour.
I joined two pieces and drilled a hole equalling the smallest diameter of her flute, which has an increasingly large diameter along its mouthpiece.
Dividing this in half, I chalk fitted both halves of the design outline to the flute.
Once glued in place, I was able to start to carve the details into the bloodwood.
Until what I was aiming for emerged…
All polished up with Danish oil.
Ready to play!
This nice old 1/4 size violin came into my workshop to be re-set up. It belonged to my customer’s great grandmother, and was the one she’d first learned on in 1895!
Two things were immediately interesting about it…
First the photograph of the original player and label that had been affixed to it back in the late 1800s…
Second, that it’s neck was not morticed in the same way we are used to seeing violin necks fitted (I’ve drawn a red line across where a neck is usually sitting).
Upon looking inside it was evident that there was not a top block, but only the end of the neck with the ribs morticed into it.
Such an interesting little violin!
A man brought in this old violin, which has been in his family for 3 generations.
It’s rib was broken at the bottom and the bottom block cracked in half. Some sort of repair was attempted on it in the last 50 years according to the owner (please don’t do that if you have an old violin that’s broken - take it to a professional luthier!)
When I took the top off to start the repair, I found an amazing connection to an English luthier in the past who had done repairs on it in 1890!
I’m honoured to have been selected to have my workshop appear in the November issue of The Strad magazine on their My Space page. You can download a pdf of the article on my workshop by clicking HERE.
The Wood Lover’s Weekend at Upper Canada Village was beautiful both in terms of the work displayed and the weather! It was good to see the work of some fellow luthiers and other wood workers, including my musician and boat building friend Al Ridgway - who’s beautiful boats can be seen here: http://alridgway.com/kayaks-canoes/
Upper Canada Village is once again hosting a Wood Lover’s Weekend over Thanksgiving (October 7,8,9). Among many things,they will have special tool displays, culinary uses of wood, and have invited many guest woodworkers (carvers, turners, canoe builders, sculptors, and luthiers!)to display their work over the weekend. I will be there all 3 days, come check it out!
I had this French viola brought into my shop with 2 cigarette burns in the top, which had been given a poor cover up effort at some point (it kind of looks like someone took a dark red marker to it!) The rest of the viola is in great condition, so the owner asked me to restore the front.
Look at the following pictures to see how my restoration of it took place and how it now looks.
Step 1: Take away ‘red marker’ and burn marks
Step 2: Retouch…until the varnish is restored to match the original
Step 3: Set the viola back up, and you wouldn’t know that it had the burns to start with!
The autumn evening class for Violin Making has started up again and you can see these 3 students hard at work!
The 6 week summer violin making evening class is now taking place and you can see these students working, each at their own stage of making a violin.
This article talks of going one step further than the Chladni method, by “using lasers to perform what’s called holographic interferometry, researchers at Cardiff University have been able to map vibrations on the micron scale to generate images of how sound emanates from instruments.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13573631
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/05/lasers-make-gui.php
