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.
Twisty
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.
Wood Aging
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!
Dragon’s Blood
Supposedly, dragon’s blood resin is the result of a fight to the death between a dragon and an elephant. The elephant has wrapped his trunk around the dragon, the dragon entangles himself with the elephant, they fall and crush each other, and both die.
Violin makers have a fondness for dragon’s blood resin as a colorant. It’s a striking red-to-orange color that some French makers used, and writers of the 1800s thought was the source of Cremonese varnish’s red.
It has a problem, though: as it ages, it bleaches out. I’ve seen several instruments with the problem shown in the photo: only the very thickest spots of varnish, such as that drip of varnish hanging on at the end of this corner, retain their red color for very long. What’s left when the red disappears is a sickly green. The cello in the photo is only about 30 years old. I once watched one instrument, a different one and new, turn from a beautiful and vibrant orange to entirely light green over a period of about seven years.
Likewise, many French violins from the 1800s are a similarly unpleasant green color, but under the fingerboard where light doesn’t reach and in the thick varnish in the inside corners of the underedges they retain some of the original red.
F-Hole Placement
Pictured is a diagram for the placement of f-holes on a Cremonese violin model.
Cremonese Varnish Texture
Here are two examples of Cremonese varnish texture. Read more »