Many of my non-violin making friends giggle at the mention of “f-holes.” But you know what makes me giggle? Antonio Stradivari had a son named Omobono! What an absurd name! Apparently, his sons got lazy and rode on their father’s fame and fortune. Yolo, Omobono, yolo. Isn’t that right? (note: I despise that acronym. Also, in this case, I would refute yolo, because about half of Antonio’s ~1200 violins still live on.)
F-holes:
practice f-holes:
Note: This would probably work on me.
I shall open with some Plain ol’ Taichi moves:
BUT WAIT! That looks familiar!
Compare with Plane ol’ Taichi moves:
When you plane, you’ve got to MOVE YO’ BODY!!! … and not forget to breathe and concentrate and stuff, etc etc.
But really, planing taichi-style puts the strength of your legs and the weight of your torso behind the plane, which will slow down arm fatigue and let your arms focus on controlling the plane. So, today’s lesson in review:
You don’t even need the check mark and X to tell you which is the right way – obviously you’d choose Shaolin Planing because it makes you look way cooler. But make sure you’ve got good footing, or else:
Those double black lines on your violin are not drawn in decorations. They come from this:
That purfling strip gets bent with an iron and stuffed into a channel, which we cut out with knives and pick out with this:
And in the process, we smash our left thumbs with the hard tempered metal of the purfling pick.
We knife two lines, 2mm deep, but there’s no real way of knowing how deep we’ve cut other than guessing by eyeballing how far down the tip of your knife has gone. Also, keeping that channel perpendicular to the surface is no easy task!
So when picking out the channel, you sometimes come across a spot where your knife didn’t reach, and the channel is unclean.
But wait… that looks familiar.
I have an idea!!!!
Okay here is the update on violin #1:
knifed:
picked:
purfled:
maple back with purfling all glued in:
We are required to read a century-old biography on Antonio Stradivari. It’s apparently full of inaccuracies. The book says Strad was a student of Nicolo Amati, but my teacher says the general consensus now is that Strad didn’t work under Amati. Whatever. I’m sure I’ve lost your attention by now. The point is, don’t believe the comic… as if you were going to anyway.
fix it with shading 