Sound post and set up

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...