Saturday, July 7, 2012

How to make a violin

 So for Science Olympiad, I made my own violin. Following are various pictures of my creation. This thing took a whole week to build during my winter break.



Shaving down the end of the tailpiece to shape it.
 Cuting out the F holes with a Stanley knife
 Got the inlay with a middle support bar (not found in professionally-made violins) attached
 Another view, this time with the front plate.
 Neck with fingerboard. I'd actually made this part before except for the fingerboard, and the whole process for that took about 20 minutes.
 Side view. Not the most elegant fingerboard, but functional nevertheless.
 My bow. Curves like a baroque bow with a metal "winding" to keep the bow's end from snapping off.
 You can see my winding mechanism here.
 Side vie. Shows the bending of the end of the bow. The little block at the end snapped off later, and I had to reglue it so it was close to the middle of the frog.
 Me working on the tailpiece with a professionally-made tailpiece to compare to.
 My "workshop." You can see the book I used at the bottom.
 Side view. You can see the parts of the violin.
Me, again working on the tailpiece.
 IT'S WOOD GRATING TIME!
 Matching up the neck to the bottom plate to fix the neck block.
 Side view. Austin is on the left, working on who knows what.
 Mark I of the Chiyoungius series. This was scrapped because it had no sound at all and, as is visible, the wood was peeling off.
 You can see in the photo above that the rounded blank had a piece chopped out of it. That piece is shown here as a F hole template. The completed tailpiece is shown at bottom. It was later relaced with stronger string as the monofilament line kept stretching and snapping due to tensile stress.
 The wood front plate with the paper template. You can see the pencil markings on the front plate because I realized that the front plate was too wide to bow, as the bow would hit the sides of the front plate before it hit the strings. I gave it lots of liposuction and did the same to the bottom plate.
Aligning the side supports just in case the bent strips of wood fail.
Me gluing them in.

And voila, there you go. If I find any more pictures, I'll be sure to upload them.

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