Darnton Violins Blog

This one’s interesting mainly because of its lack of great age: it’s from 1944, made in Hamburg, Germany; not a time and place you see many violins from. Usually I would associate this type of mud-crack surface with a soft varnish that’s been overcoated with something much harder (violating the painter’s fat over lean rule), where expansion and contraction of…

Yesterday, I took a bunch of cheap bridges, scraped one side of each, and started putting a different violin varnish ground coat on each one as a way to test.

Over the last few years I’ve been messing with a contractor’s laser level to show violin arching more clearly. It’s a variation of the maker’s idea of using a ruler and light to cast a shadow on the arch while shaping it, as pictured above, and initially I used a series of photos, and then went to movies for the same…

Genuzio Carletti, in Italy, had a working relationship with Joseph Settin in New York. Carletti made instruments, and Settin set them up and sold them.

A friend of mine brought in one of his older violins the other day. He uses a variation of my varnish that’s a bit more complex. His violin, which is around 15 years old and well-used, has acquired a really nice texture to it. It’s the most extreme on the ribs under the tailpiece, where it’s exposed to constant heat…

A bit irrelevant to violins, but I got a few of the best tools that I use in my violin making from my great-uncle, a wagon maker.

For over 100 years, treating wood with nitric acid to make it look old was a common practice of some French makers, but this can compromise structure. This violin is not even 100 years old, even though it looks 300.

It’s rare to see pre-modern violins with their original necks instead of grafted modern ones. Usually an old neck is modernized by unmounting it from the rib, adding some on the bottom, and resetting the neck in the modern, stronger way.