My Home Made Violin

So how does it sound? Please listen to me playing a less than perfect rendition of Rondeau from a grade 4 violin book and decide for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ervmaSgP_aM

For me, the sound on this violin is much much louder than I was expecting. The G and D strings sound gorgeous a much richer tone than my old violin. I definitely think it was worth "re-carving" the base bar. The sound does seem a little closed in that its more dampened than ringing resonantly. I'm hoping with time and playing the sound will open up. From what I've read online it's going to take a couple of years for the oil varnish finish to completely harden and form bonds between each layer.

I love my new violin and I feel like I have a very close personal bond with this instrument. I love that my violin is blonde just like me. I'm so glad I started this project. How many other people can say they are the only person that has EVER played their violin!

But all that is going to change tomorrow because there is one other person I will let play my violin. I'm planning to take my newly finished violin to my lesson, show my teacher and she what she thinks. She specifically said I should bring it to a lesson once it was finished. I've been giving her weekly progress updates and I think she's really interested in seeing it and trying it out. Hopefully it won't be too out of tune by the time I get to her house.

The sound post is the voice of the violin. It is a small dowel that is not glued and sits inside the violin touching the top and bottom plates. Sound posts have a reputation for being small, fiddly, difficult to fit, difficult to adjust and difficult to stand back up again if they ever fall over.

To fit my sound post the first thing I needed to know was the distance between the face and back INSIDE the violin. Now you can buy a special tool to do this but they cost quite a bit of money.

At first I tried to make my own version of the tool using some thin wire and cotton buds which had the cotton part cut off. The problem with this tool I made was the wire was too flexible. It was impossible to get an accurate measurement.

So I made another tool. This one was made from thicker wire, which incidently didn't cost me anything as it was found lying in the street outside my house. and a short piece of plastic drinking straw.

I was able to use the second tool I made to measure the distance inside as 53mm. Then I cut the dowel to 54mm to be safe.

Now the next problem is getting the sound post inside and standing up right in the right spot. Again there are expensive tools that will help someone do this but the tool used requires the dowel to be spiked onto a metal pin. I didn't want a pin size hole in my sound post and I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a tool. So I bought this...

I know you're thinking "what is that?" and "how does it work?". I bought it on ebay, it was cheap and the man that makes them has a video showing how it works so I will let him give the explanation

I put strings on loosely, inserted the soundpost then tightened the strings. By some miracle the sound post stayed in place and wasn't too short. I was very relieved by this.

For the last couple of days Ive been working on setting up the violin. These are all little minor tweaks I've made here and there. At first the top E string was buzzing a little. I don't think it was sitting in the nut slot very well. I was able to resolve that problem by just loosening the string off and tightening it up again.

Some of the pegs were quite stiff so I took them out and coloured the part that sits inside the wall of the peg box in with a soft 6B pencil. The main challenge has been trying to keep the violin in tune. Everything is under new tension for the first time and its going to take a while for everything to settle down.

Ive decided to wait for the pegs to settle in before I trim them to the same size as the peg box. I'm also considering fitting four fine tuners at the bridge to avoid constant peg adjustment.

I'm probably going to continue tweaking things but for now I consider my violin to be in a playable state. Heres a picture of it sitting inside my electric violin's case...

I struggled to find a good bridge for sale online. There are lots of violin bridges for sale in places like ebay but I wanted to make sure I received a good quality bridge. So I went and asked at my local music shop (JG Windows) to find out if they sold them.

I thought the advantage of going to a shop in person would be that I could look at various bridges and pick the one I liked. I was told at the shop that they didn't have any violin bridges in stock however another one of their shops did sell them and they would be able to arrange for a selection of bridges to be sent their the shop for me to look at. They did just that and I went back on Saturday to have a look at the selection of violin bridges.

I purchased this bridge by Teller, it cost £3.50 which I thought was a very good price. Bridges are generally stamped with little pictures of trees or stars to denote the quality of maple used. These markings range from zero to three. This one had two stars and I was happy with that. They did show me an Aubert bridge which had 3 stars but the price was £15! so I went for just the two stars instead.

The bridge was pre-cut as it had grooves for the strings already cut into it but it still needed fitting to my violin to make it optimal. The first thing I did was to use sand paper to reduce the thickness of the wood near the top edge to make it ever so slightly more responsive to vibrations. In the picture below the top image is before sanding and the bottom image after.

I then had to shape the feet of the bridge to fit the curved shape of my violin. I did this by placing some sand paper against my violin and slowly and gently rubbing the bridge against it until the feet took on the profile of my violin.

I glued the nut to the neck first. This was quite easy to do because I used super glue. I checked the position of the nut and fingerboard against the neck a few times to make sure everything was in alignment then just stuck it on.

I decided for the fingerboard to stick this on using more hide glue just in case I ever feel the need to remove or replace it. I've got a lot better at heating and mixing up the hide glue now and it didn't take as long to make it up. I applied a think layer of hide glue to the neck and the back of the fingerboard then held it in place with a clamp and left it for a day.

Once the glue was dry I carefully sanded the edge where the fingerboard meets the neck to make it really smooth. I used some 800 grit sand paper to do this. Now the neck and the fingerboard feel like they are just one piece of wood.

Tonight I started working on the bit of wood at the top of the fingerboard that has grooves in it for the strings, commonly called a nut. I am using a prefabricated fingerboard however the nut I have is just a blank and needs to be shaped.

I decided to go for ebony fittings on my violin simply for their durability. I toyed with the idea of light coloured wood for a while thinking it might look nice but standard hard waring ebony eventually won me over. The fingerboard on the old violin I currently play isn't made of ebony its made of rose wood and it shows wear quite badly.

Anyway this is what I started with, fingerboard and nut blank.

The nut blank is not actually perfectly square, one side is sloped at an angle. The sloping side is supposed to have the same gradient as the bottom of the peg box. I sanded the nut to try and get the sides perfectly flat as they were a little uneven. I realised was the nut was too long compared to the width of my violin's neck. So I held it up to the violin, drew a line on the back of it in pencil, then chopped a bit off.

Next came the meticulously agonising part of marking out the slots that the strings sit in. There are very precise measurements for this which are generally the same on all well made intruments.

The bottom string and top string must be 16.5mm apart with the two middle strings both 5.5mm away from their neighbouring strings. I measured out these distances carefully on a piece of paper, then held the paper up to the nut and transferred the lines on to the nut using a soft 2B pencil.

So now I had managed to work out where I needed to cut the nut for the strings to sit but there was still one more piece of critical information I did not have, how deep to cut the slots.

Cut the slots too deep and the string will just buzz against the fingerboard. Cut it not deep enough and the distance between the string and the fingerboard will be so great it will be difficult to press the string down with one finger.

Using google I was able to find some average measurements for distance from string to fingerboard. The bottom string being 4.76mm away from the fingerboard and the top string being 3.17mm away. Great, I though, so each string slot needs cutting to a slightly different depth. I checked this distance on my old violin and it seemed very tiny compared to the "average" measurements.

At this point I decided to completely disregard the average measurements google had provided me with and adopted a trial and error approach.

I cut the first slot a little bit, then hooked the tail piece on, attached an old string, stood an old bridge underneath it and slid the unglued nut and fingerboard into position under the string. Although not fully tightened I checked the string to make sure it was not buzzing against the fingerboard. The first slot needed to be wider to accommodate the bottom string as it is the widest. So I made some adjustments then checked the nut against the violin again.

Once I had the first slot cut I continued this slow process of repeating checking and cutting over and over again.

Here's a picture of the final nut after a long evenings work.

I'm really relieved I was able to get the distances between the slots correct. I'm confident the strings are held sufficiently high enough from the fingerboard that they wont buzz. Worst case scenario if they are too high I can always make the slots deeper later.

I've just finished the long, long, process of varnishing my violin. The reason varnishing felt like it took forever was because after every coat I had to wait for it to dry. If varnish isn't dry and another coat is applied it can get nasty cracks in the finish so to be super safe I gave each coat about a week to dry.

While the violin was drying it was hanging in the window of our spare room, the same room I use to practice. This will probably sound weird but there were times while it was hanging there drying that I felt like it was listening to me play! (ok yeah that does sounds weird).

I remembered to take some photos throughout the varnish process. You can really see the colour develop...

The finish is very shiny, almost like glass. I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Now I need to start reading up on how to fit the nut and fingerboard.

Well the glue dried and held the violin together and as I thought the outside of the violin got quite a lot of glue on it. I was able to sand the excess glue off, it took a while but I got there in the end.

One of my friends who makes her own resin jewellery very kindly gave me a few sheets of super fine sand paper today 600 grit to 1200 grit. The sand paper I had was 180 grit and although classed as "fine" sand paper, it wasnt.

So this evening I sanded the outside of the violin (again) starting with the 600 grit and working through to the 1200 grit. Oooooh smooth! the super fine sandpaper made the wood feel like gossamer silk.

Next I started on the protein layer on the outside. Although I used egg white inside I decided I was going to use gelatine for the outside. The advantage of gelatine is you dont have to beat it for ages and ages and ages like egg white. As Im working on the outside now I have to be concious of neatness. So instead of slapping gelatine on with my hands I'm using cosmetic sponges. I figured if they can apply make up evenly to a face they can apply gelatine evenly to a violin.

I chopped up 4 sheets of Dr. Oetker gelatine, added 200g of water and put it in my bowl/pan double boiler so I can heat it slowly and gently.

I applied the first coat of gelatine then dried the violin with a hair dryer. Did the same with a second coat.

The violin felt really rough now, no longer super smooth. I think the water must have lifted the grain in the wood or something. So I sanded it off yet again with the 1200 grit sandpaper and applied more coats of gelatine. After two more gelatine coats I was satisfied.

I then moved upstairs to the spare room and set up everything needed to varnish. I intend to do all the varnishing in the spare room because its easy to keep the cat out of there while I work and I can have the window wide open for ventilation. Theres also a hook attached to the ceiling in the spare room and I intend to hang my violin from this hook while each stage is drying.

First layer of varnish applied very, very, very, thinly with a sponge here is what it looks like.

I have to let this layer dry totally 100% before I do anything else if its not totally dry the finish can crack. I'm probably going to leave the violin hanging in the spare room until next weekend at least.

Progress on my violin has been on hold for a few weeks as I have been waiting for a special tool to arrive. Well it arrived this morning. It's called a reamer its like a tapered metal rod that has some sharp edges. Its designed to shave off excess wood when twisted. The special thing about it is that it is taper is 1:30 which is the same as the button and the pegs. The reason the end button is tapered is because it is not actually glued into the violin. The taper on the end button helps hold it in place when it has to hold up to all the tension in the strings. The pegs are tapered again to prevent them from slipping, unravelling and keep all the tension in the strings held down.

So I started shaving out the drilled holes with the reamer. I was suprised how quickly I was able to shape the end hole and fit the button to the end of the violin. I'm very happy with the fit, its very secure. There was no way I would have been able to do this without a special tool

I was able to fit the pegs too. This went very smoothly.

Eventually I will trim the ends off the pegs and sand them so they look round. I am going to have to take them out again when I varnish. The pegs had a tiny pre-drilled hole to hold the string. I was initially doubtful that this hole would be in the right place but it seems fine.

I actually compared these new pegs to the old violin I currently play. The pegs on my old violin are much much shorter and I know they have been replaced at least once. I think every time the pegs on my old violin have been replaced the hole has been re-scraped shaving more of the wood out of the holes gradually shortening the pegs and making them look stubby. I like how the pegs on this new violin don't look stubby hopefully they will be easy to turn and tune with 1 hand.

I also started the mammoth task of trying to glue the violin back together tonight. I mixed some more hide glue and started by gluing the piece of ebony called the saddle back to the top plate.

I then spread the glue around the edge of the bottom plate, pressed the top plate to the bottom plate and clamped it together. It was very messy work and I have got glue on the outside of the violin. I'm going to wait until tomorrow to examine the join in more detail. I may have to apply more glue. I know I will definitely need to sand the excess glue off the outside once its back in one piece.

Hopefully the glue will hold. Once I get it well glued back together and cleaned up, next job is varnishing. I'm planning on using oil varnish and at the moment I'm estimating at least 5 thin coats.

So the inside of violin has been primed with raw egg and I thought I was nearly ready to close and glue the lid back on. The only task left to do with the violin open is to fit the end pin.

Then I suddenly realised, this creation needs a label!

Now generally violin labels can't be trusted. If I had a penny for every violin out there that had a label saying "Stradivius" I would be very rich indeed. It's sadly also common for violin dealers to remove labels, swap labels and fake labels all to try increase the sale price.

I decided my label needed to be a straight talking no-nonsense job. Just say who made it, where it was made and when. There is no doubt that this is a modern violin and I'm not going to pretend it isn't by writting Stradivarius inside it. As for saying it's made in England when some of the wood was cut and glued in China I don;t have a problem with that. When it arrived from China it was not a violin, it was an empty box that was violin shaped.

So using a caligraphy pen in my neatest writing I wrote out my label and stuck it inside using a small amount of PVA glue

Hopefully in hundreds of years time the label will still be there and someone will appreciate knowing its age and origin :)

After applying the protein layer to the inside of my violin the wood must have expanded and contracted because it became very visible that in my enthusiasm to take the lid off I had cracked the wood in two places at the top.

This was not a major catastrophe violins of all ages can get cracks in them and can be repaired. I was reading this article a few days ago about how many Stradivarius violins have had extensive repair work and that people are starting to believe that the secret of their amazing sound lies within the many imperfections.

These cracks are fresh and they need sealing as soon as possible. The prefered method to fix cracks is to stick them back together with hide glue.

So I mixed up my first ever batch of hide glue. It comes as little amber pellets without instructions. Searching the web again I found various different ways to make the glue everyone having their own opinions on the best way. I used a double boiler method by placing a bowl in a saucepan full of water very similar to melting chocolate.

I mixed the glue and water using a cocktail stick as I was creating a very smalll quantity. I used 1 tsp of glue in 1 fluid oz of water. The internet was telling me I should heat until a skin formed on the top. This took ages, making me think I had used far too much water.

Eventually when there wasn't much liquid left in the bowl it started to develop the consistency of glue. I immediately applied to the cracks using the coctail stick. The cocktail stick application method wasnt very effective so I used my finger to work the glue right into the crack.

Once the glue is applied a professional would clamp the wood together so it was held while it dried. Unfortunately I don't own any posh violin clamps so I held the cracks together by putting some elastic bands around the top.

I'm not going to take the bands off until tomorrow but already the cracks are looking much better on the outside.

This may seem like a slightly weird thing to do but I'm about to coat the inside of my violin with raw egg.

I'm not crazy there is a reason for this. I've read a lot about varnishing violins recently and professional makers seem to take this subject very very seriously indeed. When a violin is varnished, the varnish apparently has to sit on top of the wood. Its important that the varnish sits on top and doesnt soak into the wood because if the varnish is absorbed by the wood this hinders vibration. The way makers for hundreds of years have been making the varnish sit on top rather than soaking in is by coating the violin with basically protein.

This stuff has many different names. I've seen it called everything from protein ground to vernice bianca. I've read that this stuff can dramatically improve the sound and tone of a violin because it seals the microscopic gaps in the wood with a substance which has elasticity helping it vibrate and make sound.

So I need to cover my violin in a protein layer inside before I glue the lid back on and close it. I also need to put a protein layer on the outside before I think about varnishing it.

Now the problem comes when trying to determine what to actually coat the violin with. There are many many different ideas and recipes. A popular receipe seems to come from an American book about violin making published in 1987. The recipe can be found here however I am not convinced that water, sugar and honey are going to help. I put this stuff under varnish I will have water molecules trapped under the varnish.

So I am using my own variation on the recipe to coat the inside of my violin. My recipe will also form a layer of protein however is much simpler to produce as it only requires 1 ingredient... egg.

The protein that I'm after is called Albumin. Wikipedia says that only about 10% of an egg is made of protein so I need to extract it from the rest of the egg white.

I separated 2 egg whites into a bowl

Then beat them until they were pretty stiff. The action of beating egg white unravels all the lovely proteins and thats what changes the colour and consistency.

Now this is the clever part after beating the egg if it is left it will start to separate and the liquid that gathers at the bottom is the albumin protein that I need.

I separated the albumin into another bowl and used fingers to coat the inside both bottom and top including base bar. After finishing the bottom the top was dry again so I reapplied and continued working this way until I had used all the albumin.

Interestingly when I went to wash my hands afterwards I noticed the egg had formed a thin water resistant skin on my fingers which is exactly what I want it to do on the violin.

Applying the first albumin layer also really brought out the shimering maple flaming on the inside of the violin like tiger stripes.

I'm hoping the back will have this pretty shiny tiger stripe pattern after I have varnished it.

I decided that the next thing I should tackle was making the end hole in the violin. I need the end hole to be done before I attempt to varnish so I can poke a stick or a pencil out of the hole and use it as a pivot while I put the varnish on.

I don't own any powertools however having just recently bought a house and also needing a drill to complete a DIY task in the bathroom I figured now was a good time to invest in a drill.

The drill I got was a Draper drill and it came from Wilkinsons. It was a lot cheaper than I thought it would be. I measured the diameter of the end pin at 7mm so I also purchased a 6.5mm drill bit. Two types of drill bit were available in the shop one for masonary and one for metal. I figured if it can drill through metal, it can drill through wood too and I bought the drill bit for metal.

The reason I bought a drill bit half a mm smaller than the size of the pin that is going into the hole is because on a violin, both the end pin and the hole it sits in are tapered. I think the reason they are tapered is because the pin that goes in the end is not glued. It just sits there and has all the tension from the strings pulling on it.

My plan is to make the hole smaller than the pin then to get a special tool called a peg reamer and work the hole until it is the same size as the pin.

Drill charged up, location of hole marked, I started drilling. Drilling very slowly and carefully. I haven't drilled many things before so I was very cautious.

*tada* my violin now has a hole in it.

I also ordered the tool I need to ream out the hole (ebay) but it may take a while to get here as its shipping from Canada.

Ok so its a new year and I wanted a new project. I've been wondering for some time now how hard is it to make a violin. Well not just make a violin shaped object but create an instrument that is actually playable. I decided this year I am going to try make my own violin. After doing a bit of research on the internet I figured the cheapest and easiest way to start would be to get a "violin in the white" basically an unfinished violin and finish it and set it up myself. I soon realised the easiest way to obtain a violin in the white without spending a fortune was to buy from a Chinese maker. Chinese violins generally have a bad reputation. Chinese makers churn these things out at an alarming rate but I figure if I'm buying it unfinished then at least I will have a fair bit of control over the finished instrument. So I went to ebay and bid on the cheapest unfinished violin available at the last possible moment on Boxing day. I won noone else bidded (I guess they were too busy sleeping off Christmas).

This is the auction I won. It was a bit of a gamble really as the listing said "I will Sent at random one violin for you when you pay for it is success." You know you're buying from China when Stradivarius is mis-spelt.

But I couldn't argue with the price, winning bid £24.56. And sure enough 8 days later I received this in the post...

General impressions, not bad. It is made of the right type of wood (spruce and maple) the inlaid purfling is pretty reasonbly done. There are traces of glue on the fingerboardless neck maybe someone tried to glue a fingerboard to it previously then took it off.

The maple on the front has patches of grey colour running through it. This is probably the reason it was very cheap however this area will eventually be under the fingerboard so I'm not too bothered. I shook it and it rattled however there was no sound post inside. I had already decided the first thing I was going to do was open the beast and see what Chinese hands had done inside.

I've never opened a violin before I'd only ever read about how to open one on the internet. After 20 mins of attacking the seam around the top with a stanley knife I was able to get it open. I don't know what kind of glue was used in China to assemble this violin the first time, but it certainly wasn't hide glue. The top was stuck so securely and so invisibly I recon they must have used some kind of super glue.

I carefully examined inside. The ribs (sides) had been lined with more maple, this was a good sign. The rattling sound was caused by a large wood shaving which was floating around inside. On the inside of the top there is a wooden strip called a base bar. This was the main reason I wanted to open it up.

Internet research revealed to me that the base bar should be at a slight angle to the grain of the wood to help strengthen when the strings are on. I checked, well done Chinese violin maker the base bar was indeed at a slight angle.

The expert opinion of Hans Weisshaar Shipman (some guy that has written a lot of book about violin making) says the base bar should be 5.5mm to 6mm wide; - ok my violin base bar is 5mm wide not far wrong.

Hans goes on to say the basebar should be 11mm to 13mm high at the center, 9mm to 10mm half way between the center and the ends, tapereing to 3mm at each end; extending in length to 4 cm short of each end of the violin top plate (measured along the line where the bass bar will be mounted, not the center length).

I measured the rest of the dimensions. the distance from the ends of the violin was fine, but it wasnt very tapered and was too tall. Heres a picture of the base bar just after I opened it.

So using the stanley knife (probably not the best tool for this job) I started shaving off wood and checking with a tape measure trying to get the base bar as close to the measurements provided by Hans Weisshar Shipman.

This is what it looked like after I had finished.

A definite improvement and hopefully the first of many.

This is what a basebar created by a professional luthier (Lance Bellamy) looks like

I'm happier now my basebar looks more like this than it did before.

I think the next big task is going to be drilling the hole through the end block so the button that holds the tail piece has somewhere to live. Time to start researching online the best way to do that. I also really need to think about buying some sand paper.