Hollowing out the pegbox

Once the scroll is in decent shape, the next task is to dig out the pegbox. This is one part of the violin that I find unsatisfying. The scroll, the f-holes, the bouts--all have a nice balance of aesthetic and functional. Even the pegs can be pretty. But the pegbox is about as beautiful as the word sounds. None of the curves or clean lines of the rest of the instrument, just a cramped and harshly rectilinear box with a tangle of pegs and string ends.

From the player’s point of view, the pegbox is annoyingly small. It’s tricky to get a fresh string into one of the pegs and have it stay in while it gets wound up. I often use a hemostat because my fingers are just too clumsy. As a player, I’d love a much bigger area there to work with.

The pegbox was also annoying to me as a maker. It’s not too problematic to chisel out most of the cavity, but getting a nice clean cut near the scroll is a pain.

Knowing that I’ll be putting strings in there, I tried to make it nice and roomy—I was advised by one source to leave at least 4 mm around each peg. Another jokingly said to make the back of the pegbox so thin that it was transparent. These ended up being about the same, an end I reached pretty much by accident.

I did not enjoy seeing that!

Sharpening up the scroll...and sharpening

Once the scroll is roughed out, there's a lot of work to tidy it up. One of the things that really helps bring it into focus is putting a chamfer on all the edges--that little bevel between planes. For some reason, it really makes it easier to see everything that the scroll is doing, and how the spiral sort of "moves." Another thing that sharpens it up is putting the fluting into the scroll--the parallel gouges that run the length of the scroll. Both of these are stylistic elements that different makers do to different extents, and some barely do at all. Additionally, in a really old scroll, they may be nearly worn away. However, in this fresh scroll, they make the pattern really stand out more sharply.
Speaking of sharp, there seems to be a universal phenomenon among wood craftspeople. Luthiers are especially fond of scary sharp tools, so everybody at the workshop spent a lot of time at the sharpening station--a hand cranked grinding wheel, a honing stone, and a strop. And it seems that everybody tested their blades in the same way: shave some hairs off of a convenient forearm. That's my left arm on the bottom, below my right arm--the picture shows how I've now got a bald patch above my left wrist.

One of the workshop participants is a luthier by trade, but was introduced to some wood artisans from another country. They had no common language, but when the foreigner saw my classmate's forearm, he laughed. He rolled back his left shirtsleeve, to reveal an identical bald patch right above his wrist. No common tongue, perhaps, but definitely a common forearm!

Practice makes better

There's only so much work you can do on the scroll with a saw. Eventually, the blades have to come out, and if you're as amateurish as I am, they come out very timidly. A little nibble here, a nick there. This is one of the differences between a tyro and a pro. Even if they produce something that is nearly the same, the beginner does it in a thousand little pixelated nibbles, while the experienced hand does it in a fluid stroke. Consider a couple of days work for me:
As far as possible with the saw, then patiently nibbling with the chisel and knife.Timidly approaching the "eye" with a delicate knife and a gouge.
Putting a very timid chamfer on the edges--that bevel that goes around the whole curve, and really sharpens everything up. I would put a little bit on, and Michael Darnton (the teacher) would tell me to make it more so. Over and over again, a contest between my timidity and his patience.
A bit of comparison with the model, and starting to rough out the heel. It doesn't closely resemble the Stainer, but it's not a classical Cremonese scroll either. What is it, exactly? Stay tuned...

So, all that was two nervous days of work for me. An experienced maker at the workshop, Ray Lee, did all that in one morning, and his flows more nicely. I must practice a bit more.

digging out the scroll

The first step in making a scroll from that lump of wood is some careful measurement, followed by careful sawing. After investing some time in making sure that all the edges of the lump of wood are perfectly flat and at the appropriate angles, a center-line is scribed into the wood. The modern violin has some fairly standardized parameters--width of the neck at the base, width of the neck at the nut, and so on--so these are also measured and scribed into the wood.
Then, it's time for a quick trip to the band saw to hack off the easy bits.
Then comes a little more delicate work. The scroll is not standardized, and a even my eye can easily discern between a Stradivari scroll and a Stainer scroll and a del Gesu scroll. My scroll, like the rest of this fiddle, is loosely based on a Stainer scroll. I made a template based on a photo, and used a pin to poke the pattern into the wood. Nibbling away with a dozuki saw begins to reveal the scroll.
There are some traditions, especially among folk makers, to put heads or other figures instead of scrolls:

I was looking at mine, and wondered whether anybody out there has done a Princess Leia scroll:

Resuming the violin project (ii)

As noted, I pretty much left off violin construction at the end of last year's workshop. This was the status quo:
The back was glued to the sides, and the top was finished but not attached. The neck and scroll existed only as a cut-out blank, fresh from the band saw and drill press.

The main agenda for me in Claremona this year was the scroll. It's buried somewhere in that lump of wood, and my job was to dig it out.

Resuming the violin project

Life has clearly not been sufficiently complicated recently. So in addition to finishing an extremely busy academic year, fixing and selling the house, moving to Oregon, and trying to buy a house in Oregon, I've spent the last two weeks at the Southern California Violin Making Workshop in Claremont. This ended up being quite the tonic. Neither the Real Doctor nor I had done anything on our respective violins since, oh, July or August of last year, and both of us had been pedal to the metal at work. So, shifting gears from work to lutherie was pretty crunchy and took a couple of days. The intense and complete refocus really cleared my mind.

The Real Doctor had a head start, as I had to miss the first week of the violin building class for the last week of my biology class. Of course, everything in Sacramento took longer than expected, so I didn't get to LA until late at night. This meant driving past the central valley feedlots at dusk--peak bug time, as our car's bumper will attest:After a brief stop at the parents', it was off to "Claremona" (i.e. Cremona in Claremont) and the workshop. The Real Doctor sent me this picture to let me know what I was missing.
The picture made me want to get there sooner. I count everybody there as a friend.

Final Final

So, after the last lecture there was the final—the final final of my career at Davis. I think my exams may stress me out more than my students.

Writing an exam is stressful. I choose some biological topic—a type of diatom, biofuels, wine, what happens to a dead whale—and ask questions about it. The theme for this exam was the origins of life. For the students, a “themed” exam requires the application of stuff from the class, rather than just knowing it. For me, such an exam means an excuse to meander through the literature on a subject I find diverting. I still have to make sure there are still a good distribution of easy and hard questions, that the questions are precise but not too lawyerly in their wording, that the wrong answers are clearly wrong but at least slightly plausible (this is much harder than it sounds) and that the answers are not all “c”.

The final was scheduled for Monday at 3:00. Having a deadline helps, since otherwise I tend to just do more and more meandering through the literature and write weirder and weirder questions. This deadline was made more difficult by a couple of factors—the chaos of moving and having work done on the house was one, and an absolutely essential concert by the Alexander String Quartet the previous evening was another. (During the intermission at the quartet concert, I overheard one of the audience telling his companion that “I really should be at home writing my final exam right now—but I couldn’t miss this!” I told him that I sympathized, and found out that his final, in Chinese history, was scheduled for 10:00 AM on Monday. So, I’m not the worst.) At any rate, the exam was more-or-less complete by 3:00 AM Monday. I emailed it to the TAs for critical comments.

Physically producing the exam can also be stressful. Monday morning, I incorporated most of the TA’s editorial work, rearranged the questions to make A, B, and C versious of the exam, printed it, answered emails from panicking students, and went off to Davis. Since I never get my exams ready far in advance, I never can get them printed by campus reprografics, so I end up copying and sorting them myself. Usually this goes smoothly, but this time was an absolute nightmare. One copier kept jamming; another said that it had made 100 copies of one version of the test, but had only produced 60; another ran out of paper and wouldn’t tell me how many copies it had produced before it quit. It was a real copying nightmare, and what should have taken less than an hour still wasn’t finished in an hour and forty-five minutes, when the exam was scheduled to begin. I ended up starting a third of the class with incomplete exams, and had to run back to the copier to finish up and give them the remainder of their exams a half hour later.

The real stress is the interim between the start of the exam and the grading. Normally this is bad enough: I hope so badly that the students all ace the exam. If I’ve done my job properly, and they’ve done their job properly, then the class average should be about 90%. I know this is never the case, but the stress comes in wondering just how far short of my hopes reality will be. I can write an easy exam, or a challenging exam, or a boring exam—no matter what, the class average is usually somewhere between 60% and 75%, and I count 75% as a raging success. Anyway, I am on pins and needles from the moment I hand out the exam to the moment I look over the question-by-question analysis of the test results.

This normally stressful situation was made even worse than usual for my final final. There was the aforementioned copying snafu. There was my own cellphone ringing during the exam—our realtor with an urgent update on the house we want to buy in Oregon. There was my own cellphone ringing, again—our realtor in Sacramento with an urgent query about a detail of our house we’re trying to sell. One of my students, who I was aware had neurological issues, had a seizure late in the exam period. Fortunately, one of her neighbors was a first-aider, and the paramedics came rapidly, but it made for a very nervous and disruptive experience all around.

Two weeks later, it’s almost all done. Almost. The mean for the final was about what I expected, in the low 60's. The distribution of overall grades in the class was also about what I expected. The smart students got A’s, the steinkopfs failed. But it’s not all over. The TA in charge of running the scantrons somehow missed five of them, and couldn’t find them until after I had submitted my grades to the registrar. So I’ll have to file some annoying paperwork on Monday, but then, I’ll relax. I’ll be finally finally done.