Violin Forum/Message Board

[John Cadd]

The famous carver Grinking Gibbons might have made some violins or just adapted the shape in his works of art but he would have used more different shaped gouges than you would expect. In a scroll shape he used the right curved gouge to suit the final curve he wanted at that part of the scroll. As the curve got tighter he would change to a tighter curved gouge.
Discuss .
I mentioned this after watching one video where a maker uses just one gouge for most of the job. A number of curved gouges become more useful near the final stages . The sequence needs to be ; working on the wider parts of the curves and reducing blade curvature as the tighter bends arrive. Otherwise the narrower gouges will leave scratch marks going outwards from the centre. It`s worth working out a logical sequence. That`s half the fun of making a violin .
Normal gouge handles seem too long for scrolls. I took the handles off mine and embedded the blades in mahogany with about one inch coming out of the handles. The handles were fitted like a sandwich with a metal filling . Araldite fixing will be better than ready made glue which has a nasty way of setting off rust .The handles were carved to fit my thumbprint mainly . But the thumb is also used to rest on the scroll as the hand does the cutting movement . Rather like cutting eyes out of a potato with a peeler . The wrist is brought in to give a slight twist and make a smoother cut .
If you can organise a vertical leather , padded pole to press the scroll against it will eliminate stooping over the bench and make the reverse side cutting quicker to check ,continuously. Do all that standing up . The pole gives some equal and opposite stability and saves a lot of arm / hand tension . Your hand joints will get a bit creaky as you get older otherwise .

[Michael Darnton]

Using a minimum of tools would have been the norm 300 years ago. You can sometimes see that Joseph Guarneri filius Andrea used one gouge for most of his scroll carving by the nicks in it that he didn't bother to grind out.

Trying to work in a traditional manner, I only change gouges when forced to, and use mainly just three.
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[John Cadd]

Would you recommend not keeping the tools sharp ? Traditional ? 300 years?

[Michael Darnton]

Sharp tools can have chips. I was more commenting on the evidence we have for what they actually did. I do like the idea of not having to keep 20 gouges sharp all of the time because I only have five, total, though.
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[John Cadd]

20 ? Oh 10 each side . I see .

[Michael Darnton]

Look at photos of violin maker shops. Searching Google for violin maker bench turns up a few. It's as if some could never walk by a gouge without buying it. Likewise for planes. A full commercial set of scroll gouges can run to 19. I bet the old guys would have been shaking their heads. On the other hand, one of the most prolific cello makers I know can roll his entire tool set up in his apron.

Everything you own has to be maintained. Someone once said that woodworking was 90% sharpening, 10% cutting. I think there are quite a few violin "makers" who increase that to 200% sharpening, 0% cutting.

This is a set I found that you can buy somewhere, as an example. When I bought mine, I borrowed a set like this for a while, then bought only the ones I actually used:


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[John Cadd]

One thing that surprises me about carvers is the uncomfortable handles they use. The set in the photo look fine. That would be too many for me. In the scroll video by a violin maker the final result looks great but he uses scrapers for the wide curves at the sides . A wide fishtail gouge does that section very well
One instruction video tells us to sharpen gouges straight across but the curly scroll work might be simpler if a gouge was curved in both directions for the internal corner angles. That would allow a rolling , sliding
(slicing) action . A combination of movements . Maybe even keep the outer edges blunt and polished and cut with the central part . That would be similar to using a razor saw with the leading 1/4 inch edge teeth ground away smooth to just position the blade before sawing . Japanese saws have a blank flat section on the end of their blades . Maybe a similar idea .
Another carving site recommends never cutting Up the grain .Always cut downwards. That is important in woodturning if you want to avoid a Catch .
But more than a few violin maker sites show the early roughing out pushing uphill . It looks like a bad habit .Often the cut is just a straight push without any twist to slice the wood . One Carleen Hutchins film shows the belly being carved with a 2 inch split in front of the gouge. Horrendous .
Don`t take too much notice of my details here . I always get bogged down in technical details . I do it with everything .It`s something in my genes or personality . When I was young , in a theatre I always wanted to know what was going on behind the curtain . More interesting than the show itself .

[John Cadd]

Duplicated during a Microsoft glitch .

[John Cadd]

Chisel and gouge handles are always going to be used when making a scroll . It might seem like nit picking but uncomfortable handles have been dominant for centuries. Making them smoother in the palm of the hand is a positive movement. Lately I had to repair several chisel handles after buying them from ebay. Many had split wooden handles. The Sheffield steel was too good to waste . I was free to choose any handle shape I wanted .
It boiled down to 1) Making the handle length match the blade length .
2) making one groove around the handle for the thumb and the middle finger joint. The forefinger was not involved.
3) the overall circumference or thickness was standardised to suit my hand and the end of the handle fitted to my palm .
So palm , thumb and middle finger joint and handle thickness are all related . Not for the general public .Just for me . Making smaller handles for thinner blades never made much sense .
The simple action of pushing a chisel is matched by pulling the chisel back again. Large ,smooth , bulbous handles in boxwood may look nice but they make the hand work a lot harder for nothing .
It`s all related to making things by hand .
I forgot to mention Grinling Gibbons was active 300 years ago . The analysis of one carving showed that the wooden flowers had to be made in separate layers as they were so thin and realistic .Carving the backs in one piece of wood was impossible so he made them in layers and then carefully nailed them together from the back. That makes me think of Stradivari fitting his necks on the body of a violin .

[John Cadd]

On Violinist.com the Luis Manfio blog , he spells out one sensible strategy for the decreasing radius cutting on the sides of the scroll .Then chooses enough gouges to match the final shapes . Each gouge is able to rotate enough to give a clean finish . It`s a maker`s choice to decide to keep the lines parrallel towards the centre or to make them slightly trumpet shaped.
Another maker in his video has about 8 gouges on the bench . In most cases the chisels and gouges end up being used like fountain pens with awkward finger grips struggling to cut the maple. Shorter gouges shaped to your hand and stabilised by the thumb resting on the scroll makes more sense . That`s a more organic way to carve .

[John Cadd]

There is an article by Roger Hargrave about the Alessandro Gagliano Rotondo violin of 1710 which shows coloured photos o of the scroll . These are on the Strad Poster .The diagrams of the scroll have important differences to the photos . If you look at the photo of the left scroll face the scroll is laid flat and the measurement from outer curve to inner curve gradually decreases in a clockwise direction . Starting at 9 oclock the reduction in width is smooth and steady until 3 oclock. Then it tightens up and looks a bit squashed and the turn stays a bit narrow for 1/4 turn . Then the groove width wobbles around till it reaches the eye. The cutting is quite deep as it reaches towards the eye .
That journey around the scroll face describes the appearance visually , but the diagrams have evened it all out and the variations ( and artistic or accidental interest have been lost ) . A copyist would do well to be aware of the approximate nature of the cleanly presented diagrams .
I find the back of the scroll where the sides rise from the bottom curve and rise quite straight for a little way has a beautiful effect . It`s hard to understand why I feel that . It`s just a bit wider but it`s wonderful .