Books › Violin making, 1902 › scan 150
Scan 150
Violin making, 1902
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 92. See the scan on archive.org.
1Now, after the first two coats, you must use about a three-quarter inch fine hog hair brush (not many hairs in, mind) and for the later coats one with camel hair. Sit on a low chair, have the light to your right hand, the varnish before you handy, not too high. The violin is held by neck, left hand of course; the stick at the broad end through the hole where comes later the end pin (see above) rests on your right leg as you sit. Get a fair dip of varnish in your brush, but NEVER flood it; and beginning carefully under the fingerboard, first one side, then the other, working the top sides of the instrument also alternately, until the soundholes be reached, when inside these cuts must be neatly coloured, after which you just tip your brush with the varnish, neatly continuing where you leave off, so that none can see a break in your progress. This advice applies until ribs and scroll be all done after the belly and the back. I have ever found the upper table the most exacting and difficult; but, once again, never flood your brush, and you will varnish sooner or later. But never hurry: and this advice applies to every thing you do in the construction of the violin. Patience of no ordinary character you must exercise: if you have it not it will come to you, but through experience alone, through failures, through catastrophes innumerable. But what then? These things that have mastered you stand mastered in turn in the excellent result of to-day, so let yesterday go to the wall.
3Now that we can consider the operation of varnishing at an end, the instrument is hung on a wire, free to the
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.