After crack repair, successful reassembly and setting up of the quite lovely violin number 30, I turned to some less beautiful specimens.
First to finish off the number 13 which served as a guinea pig for the repair I did on number 30. When I had it assembled and started tuning up the strings, the neck fell off, which was completely unrelated to the problems I fixed before (and just serves as another warning not to buy fiddles from Facebook Marketplace). I've refitted the neck now and the strings have been on for a few days now, so I'm hoping it holds this time.
In an effort to make the old fiddles more user-friendly to modern players, I ordered in a few tailpieces with integrated adjusters, so I'm now fitting these to the instruments that came with no adjusters or just one. Have done that for number 30 and 13 above, and also for the czechoslovakian student fiddle number 27.
Right now I'm setting up the 3/4 Lark violin (number 33) I recently bought for £ 5, which I believe reflects its value. I'm cutting a bridge and putting on new string and will have to find a chinrest for it.
All of which isn't generating any particularly interesting photos, so I'm sharing one from my early years in woodworking instead:
The funny thing about it is that I still have most of the tools from the toolset you see on the wall behind me, so I arranged them for a still life:
If I ever decide to make a violin from scratch, I'll cut the f-holes with that fretsaw ...
NB I've now moved the list of instruments that pass through my pirate luthier workshop to a permanent page which I will update whenever necessary, independent of the blog entries.
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