Coating the inside with protein

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.