A New Week Begins

Unfortunately, I have a cold today so I'm not teaching any lessons. Don't want to pass the bug on to my students, and there is always plenty to do around here anyway. So far this morning, I have worked on a couple of fiddles in the repair shop. One is my own personal fiddle -- something I got for Christmas. It is a beautiful fiddle made in Germany around 1870 or so. It has awesome flaming, but someone decided to coat it with polyurethane. For those of you who don't know, you should never do this to an instrument. It may make it LOOK beautiful, but it changes the tone of the instrument and also devalues it. Anway, I've been busy using different rubbing and polishing compounds to remove as much of the polyurethane as possible. At least the instrument was not stripped of its original finish.

The other instrument I'm working on is a fiddle for a customer. It is also a German fiddle from around 1870. I removed the top to put in a new bass bar, regraduate the top, and fully block the instrument. It had the bass bar carved into the top of the instrument. You'll get a better sound from a handfitted bass bar, which is actually a separate piece of wood that is fit to the fiddle and then glued in. All I have to do now is fit a new fingerboard to the instrument (the old one was cracked) and then set it up with a new bridge.

Tomorrow is our jam session. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again. It's kind of like a family get-together once you get to know everyone. Still, we have new people almost every time, so you never know who will show up or what you'll play.