Usually I play the fiddle for an hour or so first thing in the morning, but I am going to try using that time to get a little work done in the shop. More work in the evening often doesn’t sound good, but playing the fiddle almost always does.
As you can see, both fiddles are out of clamps and ready to have their sides trimmed down. Well with the exception of that clamp on the little guy. And speaking of, they need names so I can stop calling the little one the little guy. David and Goliath seems appropriate. So anyway, David is wearing a clamp. I was trimming a corner down and the end chipped. This is one of the dangers in trimming corners. There’s way to do it which eliminates the problem, but I wasn’t doing it that way, of course. I think it will be salvageable, but I won’t know for sure until I actually finish that corner. If not, I’ll have to heat the joint apart and make a new rib for it.
This got me thinking about making bamboo fly rods. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before, but it was the other fine woodworking craft I’ve pursued. They have a bunch of things in common, but one I am still wondering about is how mistakes fit into each craft. One of the frightening aspects to making rods was that there were certain steps in the process in which you could ruin all your effort up until that point. Worse, these steps are all toward the end of the construction (as opposed to the decorative) part of the process. So a rod is made of 12 separate pieces of precisely formed bamboo. It took me maybe 20ish hours to prepare those strips. When you glue the strips up, 6 into each half of the rod, there is a real danger of them not going together correctly in one of many ways. Once they’re glued, they’re glued. If they’re glued wrong, your work is shot. Glue up night was always a big thrill.
So far, I haven’t found a step like that in violin making, and I like that. If my chipped corner does indeed cost me the rib, it just means I have to take a couple steps back and do it again. Since the point here is to have fun making violins, not crank out lots of product, this just means more fun time in the shop. Right? I am 98% certain of that, especially if I careful do not think much about what it’ll be like to string Goliath up and hear it for the first time. No thinking about the finish line!