So here I am temporarily glued together :-) Even though the wooden mould is still inside it's exciting to get to this stage of actually looking like a violin. Lots more work to do. The next job was to align the outside edges to prepare for the inlay.
After a bit of planing and rasping it was looking well shapely! But soon it had to be taken taken apart and on to the next stage..
This is a purfling marker. Its used for scoring the wood to produce a perfect line around the edge, but first i had to practice on an offcut.
After scoring i had to use a craft knife to cut a precise channel in the wood and then use the dibber or was it dibbler? to remove the wood from the channel. I made several very bad attempts and i was getting more nervous.. but eventually they thought i should just go for it. I had been practising on the spruce which is much harder to work on being a softwood, this is done with good reason because by the time i got to work on the actual backpiece made of maple it was much easier.
I was really pleased with my scoring..i did get a luthier to make the first couple of cuts with the craft knife because if you go wrong at this stage..its very difficult to put it right.
WhooHoo! All was going well. The dark line you see is the purfling, its made from 3 very fine layers of wood sandwiched together I had just layed it in at this stage to check my channel was deep enough, as you can see i still had more to cut away. To get a perfect snug fit i had to heat the purfling on a lightbulb to bend it.
The pic above and below show the finished inlay all hammered in glued and using a small gouge fluted all round to sink it right in. Those amazing beesting corners were achieved by shaving minute amounts off the purfling at about a 45 degree angle. It all went really well..much better than i thought, and i would say that I enjoyed this stage the most so far.
After finishing the front inlay I returned to the back plate and planed using those tiny shoe planes to finish off the arching. I had to keep drawing contours around using the calipers with pencil. It was painstakingly slow! and then just when i thought it was nearly done.. i had to shave even more off with a cabinet scraper.
An important part of the cambridge violin making workshops is the shared supper we bring to feast in-between the 2 sessions. Above is the soup starter which is supplied on a rota basis between myself and 2 others. This was a scrumptious vegetable soup by Dave :-) Below is the table typically laid with yummy cheeses, hams, salads, breads, olives & humous. Pudding is always a divine cake baked by Tim.
After much fine scraping, the maple is finished off as smooth as can be. It looks fabulous!
My last job for this end of term was to prepare the back for gouging out the inside by marking out 5mm from the edge and anything inside this gets hollowed out but working with very precise measurements (i'm quite terrified of doing this!) The maple will sit in this cradle relief shape of a violin to protect it. Just a few weeks to wait until the easter 3 day course when I can make a start on this.
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