Lots of stuff, so starting at the end and working back:
At this point, I just have a little work on the outline and then scraping before the arching is officially done. Super exciting. Here are some shots in reverse chronology leading up to that.
Besides closing in on getting the arching done, I made two sizable changes to the shop. One you might have noticed in the photos: I switched out how I am stabilizing the plate for carving.
Previously I used two screws through the carving board that just barely (8mm or so) stuck into the top, holding it in place. This works, no doubt, but I like to frequently pick up the plate to look at it from different angles and that’s hard to do when it’s screwed to a board. I got the idea for this method from the Cremona based luthier Davide Sora — he has a nice collection of videos including one which shows how his carving cradle is made. The little corners are made from 3mm plywood and the screw holes through them are elongated so they can be slid back and forth to match the plate being carved. To keep them from sliding I glued sandpaper on the bottom.
The plate is held perfectly in place, but I can pick it up to take a look whenever I like. Also, you’ll notice that the carving plate is now sitting on my vise. I bolted a block of wood to the bottom of the carving plate which allows me to use the vise to hold the whole thing. I can rotate it as I need, and it allows me to carve without nearly as much bending over. It’s hard to overstate how much nicer this all makes carving.
The other large change to the shop: I found a craigslist ad for a bunch of gouges and knives, so I drove over and loaded up. Putting very sharp tools in a drawer together is not good for them, so I built them a little rack
I only have a couple more outstanding fiddle tools and I am done with tool buying.
Finally, the biblical story gone awry bit: for now Goliath wins. I am approaching the point where both the Maggini and the little fiddle are at the same stage. Up until now, this meant that I’d go back and do the next few steps on the 1/16th. After a bunch of thinking about this over the weekend, I think I am going to put aside working on the 1/16 for now. The most banal reason for this is just the lack of time. I only have so much time to spend in the shop, and I now have a fuller understanding of just how much time goes into, say, carving a plate. It’s a bunch, people. As it gets warmer, my time will just get even more limited.
More importantly though, I am realizing that making a fiddle is probably closer to sculpture than it is to making a cane rod (for instance). To spend so many hours trying to bring something into existence, with so many potential pitfalls, you really have to love what you’re making the way a sculptor does her sculpture. I can only put my creative energy, at that level, into one thing at a time — that’s going to be the Maggini for now.