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.