Sept to December

Unfortunately my camera dates were set wrong so I have no record of exactly when I did what! but i can remember what order I did things in and you will have a sense of the very slow timescale this stage of the project involves (well its all very slow really!)

My next Job was to get a really precise flat edge to my ribs..this is because i would then use them to mark out the actual shape of the violin front and back. The way to achieve perfect levelling was to use a slab of granite covered with graphite. I had to keep rubbing the whole rib structure on the graphite and any marks left were planed off.

Next was the same process with the front and back wood..getting perfect flatness so the two surfaces could marry precisely to draw around. I loved using the huge plane, i felt much more confident working with such a solid amount of wood!

Now the marking out. The teacher helped me line up with exact markings for centres and other angles and then 2 traces were done the second one using a pencil in a washer to get a 4-5 mm sawing guide line.

Now the really scary bit! which thankfully I didn't have to do. The Luthier disappeared into the machine room

 ( where we are not allowed) and cut it. I did a very dumb thing and took a picture of him ..the flash startled him :-/ but he didn't slip! I was so embarrassed.

Wow.. i was so excited to now have 2 violin shapes to work with.. felt like I was really getting somewhere (for about 5 minutes!) 

Some more markings were added to give me a rough guide to what would be going where like the f holes and the highest point of the arching. I then had to make saw cuts up the neck end as this would be too difficult to gouge out. The saw in the picture is a Japanese one.. they are clever saws as they cut on the backstroke.

A depth guide line was marked ready for the job of gouging out all the excess wood to form the main rough arch shape. As you can see there is quite a lot to chip away at! 

 

Gouging is probably my least favourite tool but im hoping that the more i use it the more i will learn to like it.I took many pics but ill just show a selection of the stages and tools i used to get there.

Working from the edge i had to roughly shape the arch 

Then the edges were routed on the machine to form a perfect flat base to later add an inlay (purfling) The circles were to remind me not to gouge any more from there!

                                        

Then lots more shaved off using these tiny thumb planes though they look like little shoes to me so i've renamed them shoe planes.

   

At last! Back and front rough arched :-) The front spruce wood was done second as its a very tricky material to work with..one of the luthiers describes it as a cross between bamboo and marshmallow, which i think describes it perfectly. I think this is how i left it before the christmas break..the next stage was to temporarrily glue the back and front to the ribs..more about that in the next post :-)