Books › An encyclopedia of the violin, 1925 › scan 105
Scan 105
An encyclopedia of the violin, 1925
14 lines. Read by computer on 26 September 2026. Printed page 81. See the scan on archive.org.
1the upper and of the lower part of the instrument that this arch should be placed.
3If the arches have been hollowed with all possible care, and if attention has been paid to removing only a little wood at a time, the marks of the gouges do not stand out prominently, and it is easy to remove them with the tooth plane. In addition the tooth plane serves to give an arched form to the throat of the back. The throat is the name given the small groove running all around the back, at 3 millimeters (1/8") from the edges, in which the purfling is encrusted.
5Having thus equalized the various parts of the exterior of the back, to as great a degree as the tooth plane will permit, small scrapers should be employed to do away with all asperities which may still exist, and one may end with smoothing down the exterior with glass paper.
7All these operations having been completed, attention should be paid to hollowing out the back on the plane side, and to giving it the thickness demanded if the instrument is to have the proper tone when it is entirely completed.
9A piece of rounded wood is placed in one of the holes of the work bench, and wedged firmly into place. This peg of wood serves as a point of support for the side of the back, which is held against it in the left hand, while the right hollows the wood by means of a gouge, working transversely.
11In order to carry out this work, a layer of wood should be placed on the workbench, against which the finished side of the back may rest, in order to prevent its being scraped or trod upon. Certain precautions should be adopted in hollowing out the back: (1) all those portions of the outline against which the blocks, the corners, the ribs and the linings are to rest should be left perfectly intact; (2) the wood should be removed only with great caution, for fear of taking away too much, an evil for which there is no remedy, and care should be taken to leave a thickness of 1 millimeter (1/25") in excess of that required all over the back and its parts. A caliper should be used as a guide in this work, and it should be completed with the tooth plane, scrapers and glass paper.
13The back completed, it is laid on that side of the mold which has the ribs, linings, corners and blocks ready to receive it. The edges of the back should be examined in order to see whether they stand out equally above the entire outline of the ribs, for they should rise above them to the extent of 2 millimeters (1/12"). Then, attaching the back to the ribs by means of four fiddle screws or clamps holding together the two parts where they are largest, the wimble is used to make a number of small holes which, traversing the back, end in the blocks, opposite the point of junction of the upper and lower ribs. In order that these holes may not be visible later on, they are made in the very spot where the purfling is to be placed. When these holes have been made, two small pegs of plane wood are inserted in them.
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