Finishing the garland

The sides of the violin must be thin to save weight and make it sing nicely. However, it’s hard to glue the top and bottom to something that’s only a millimeter thick. So, linings are attached to the sides so that the top and bottom have about three millimeters to glue on to. I made the linings out of cedar, which is much easier to bend than birch. It is bent to fit the upper and lower bouts, and let into little channels in the corner blocks in the C-bouts.

Special high-tech clamps are used for gluing the linings. You can see that my violin looks exactly like the one in the how-to book.

Once the linings are in, the top surface of this frame must be made absolutely flat. A plane, followed by a piece of glass covered with sandpaper, do the trick.

Finally, the sides of the violin—the “garland”—is done. If you click on the picture, you can see the grain on the top block (over on the left) is going parallel to the sides. It should be perpendicular, like the bottom block. Learning!

On to the top and back!