Michael Darnton is a violin maker, restorer, writer and teacher who lives in Chicago...
Some makers theorize that the early Cremonese makers inlaid purfling in three separate, unglued strips, the way French makers of the 1800s did. That has never appeared to me to be the case, and here’s one Cremonese violin, a Brothers Amati from 1605, where there’s obvious proof that the purfling was glued together before it was bent and glued in place. Notice the compression folds on the inside of the curve (the outside, black, purfling strip).
Violin shop guys all like cool old cases. These days there are special shipping cases that aren’t long enough for and don’t have bow space, which makes them easier to carry on airplanes or fit in small boxes, but I didn’t know until I saw this that the idea isn’t a new one. This one has a little name plate, just below the middle hinge, from the George Gemunder shop, so it’s at least 100+ years old.
It used to be lined green, as you can see from one less-bleached spot under the violin’s lower back, and it has a leather cover. Unfortunately, the covering leather has red rot, the result of a tanning process which was used for a very short period only in the last half of the 1800s, and there’s nothing that can be done to stabilize the leather.
Linseed oil doesn’t dry very hard, no matter how long you wait, and that’s why it’s usually considered a bad idea to use too much of it directly on the wood before varnishing, since it could dampen the sound of the instrument. One day in 1995 I decided to pour some about 3mm deep in a pie pan, to see what would happen.
It took a year or so to dry all of the way through (for months there was a thick oil syrup on the bottom under the hardened surface skin, next to the pan), but the crinkly shrinking started right away, as did the darkening of the color. This photo is of an area of the oil about the size of a business card. Now the oil is as stiff as an art gum eraser, but a bit stretchy, too. It hasn’t changed at all in the last decade or so.
Many people have heard that the early makers glued their fingerboards on before varnishing the instruments, and that there’s no varnish under the boards, but it’s not something you get to see very often. This is a Dutch violin from around 1700. Notice that the central area that’s been hidden under the fingerboard is a little more grey colored than everywhere else?
That’s because that area has no varnish at all.
You can also see where 300 years of dirt and polish got pushed up under the edge of the board and never cleaned off, and by the extra-long dirty area at the bottom, how the violin started with a board about that’s shorter than the one it’s had in recent years.
This violin has an unusually wide unvarnished spot. It’s possible to reach in farther from the sides than this maker did, and usually the bare strip is narrower than this
Setting a post in a viola that had just come into the shop, I saw this through the endpin hole. I wasn’t sure what was going on, so I took the top off, and this is what I found:
No, it wasn’t working all that well. I’ve never seen another like it, but it appeared to be very recent. This was a very expensive viola–too expensive to be doing this kind of experiment on–and it’s not in there any longer. With a normal bar the instrument sounded fine, so I really don’t understand what justified putting this mess inside.
Studs are used behind cracks to provide reinforcement. If the crack was a clean one, and properly glued, they may not even be necessary. I bet you could remove half of these, though, and not miss them.
Here is what really bad top wood looks like. You can see the one on the left is growing straight, but the two in the middle are impossible.
One objective in choosing tops is to find ones where the fibers run straight from one end to the other, and top wood is usually split out to get this, but when trees have twists like these, they’re only suitable for building a fort stockade. That may be why they’re where they are: as part of the fort wall at Fort Wilkins State Park, at the northernmost tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
This is one of those things that I’ve always wondered about: how fast does wood darken, and how? The central stripe here, with three grains of wood, is a bass bar in a violin made in 1941. I had cut it halfway down (it was being replaced) and noticed that the soft grains to the outside were darkened, but the central grain retained some of its original brightness. The hard grain lines on either side of the central one limited it’s exposure to air, preventing the central section from darkening!
