Musical Instrument Construction Course

Okay, so here are the pictures of my violin. The first day we made templates from the plans and that took the whole day. It didn't seem like much at the end of the day, but it was a lot of work.

Day two we made the mould for the violin, I forgot to take a picture of it. It took a full day to make the mould and cut out where the corner blocks and end blocks go. Then I had to cut out the rectangles you see on the picture (below) with a coping saw for the clamps to fit into. Coping saws are quite the fun little gadget. It took me a while to get the hang of using it, and I was slow and not nearly as precise as I would have liked to have been.

Here's a picture of my work on day three, after I'd glued the corner blocks and the end blocks in place.





On day four two tornadoes went through the area and our class was cancelled due to a power outage at the school. That was really disappointing; we were all so anxious to get on with our projects.


However, the school is near the hospital, so day five, the electricity was back on in that area, (unlike where we live!) and we were back in action.

Here's my picture at the end of day five. You can see the side ribbing is all glued into place around the mould and it actually looks like it might be a violin some day! There are some mistakes, but I'm not pointing them out. I'm so excited that I was able to do something like that. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Eventually, when it comes off the mould, the corner blocks (pointy dark brown parts) will be inside the violin, but will be trimmed much smaller and the outside pointy bits will be cut down to the proper size. The two end blocks will be inside the violin too and the mould will be ready and waiting for my next violin.

Awesome course. Kudos to Philip Davis the instructor for his patience.