iburkard.worklog

Thursday, November 29, 2007

 
Half of my Thanksgiving weekend consisted of sewing, and more sewing. My favorite violins coffin had been left in disrepair for too long, and needed to be relined. I was actually in the habit of placing two violins within the same open case (one inside the main compartment, and then another one resting in the lid), which was pretty ridiculous.


I don't know how on earth my grandmother ever managed to make a quilt the size of a bed, when I can barely handle sewing a straight beaded line for approximately 18 feet. I quickly learned that the string I had purchased in college (a lot of colored dollar store thread manufactured who knows where), was so low quality that it was not worth using. Half way through a seam, the thread would get caught or brake. I tried waxing the thread to make it slip through the cloth, but cheap is cheap. I eventually ended up buying Singer thread... smooth sailing.

It's usually part of my repertoire to repaint and polish everything so that it looks almost new, but I held back on this one, and left the violin case as it should be... refurbished, not restored. In retrospect, I'm glad that I didn't over clean it (although, I did gut the interior, and add a wooden flap to replace the old fabric/paper one).

I spent the rest of my weekend in NJ. It was nice to get away from my apartment, spend time with family, walk around and enjoy the fall, and eat food. I had so much pie.
I have too many new illustration books... too many violin projects to talk about (...think, 18th Century... think Baroque.) I received some mother of pearl scales for a violin, and some white pearl for purfling. I also received some aged wood for bass bars and posts, and more wood for making my own bridges. I'm just waiting on some standard purfling and a glue pot, and then I'll begin my personal project. But, for now, I'm very busy trying to figure out the best way to baroque a classical violin.

The violin in my last post now belongs to a young musician!


Sunday, November 11, 2007

 




I received a bootleg He-Man Battle Cat figure from Argentina, and lifted graphics off of the box for t-shirts. The toys are always so dangerous (easy to chip paint, and toxic plastic), but I'm a sucker for the blister artwork. Whoever does this artwork has super Napoleon drawing skills.

My friend Shimmy sold me his violin last week. I cleaned it up, redid the setup, and now it's a really good sounding violin. I should have taken a before picture, but I had no idea that I would end up doing so much work.

When I first played it, the entire thing buzzed. There were four lever-style fine tuners on the tailpiece, which I immediately removed. Removing the fine tuners cut down on the buzzing, but there was still something wrong. It turned out that the fingerboard hadn't been shaped properly, so the G and E string were resting right on the fingerboard (causing a guitar fret buzz sound).

I replaced the strings, fit a new bridge, replaced the tail piece and tail gut, arched the fingerboard, removed lots of rosin buildup from the top, and removed velvet from the upper ribs (the violin had been sitting in the case too long, and the spirit finish melted into the velvet lining).

When I finished with Shim's old violin, I adjusted the bridges on all of my other violins... much easier to play.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

 

Oh no, I have a workbench again! The big question is... violin or sword? I have at least four old sword projects that have remained unfinished since 2004.



 
How to repair a bow... in pictures. I actually ran into a few snags while doing this, and should have gone through the trouble of documenting the troubleshooting aspect. This still isn't an ideal repair scenario, since the pearl slide turned out to be a thin bit of pearl glued on to a weak wooden backing.

I replaced the beveled slide with horn, which seems to be a pretty forgiving material. Horn is not a standard material for this job (usually solid pear for the slide - and bone or ivory for the tip), it's simply what I had on hand.

Click image below for a slightly larger format...


Archives

June 2006   July 2006   August 2006   September 2006   October 2006   December 2006   January 2007   June 2007   July 2007   August 2007   September 2007   October 2007   November 2007   December 2007   February 2008   August 2009   February 2010