Posted by Chet Bishop on Thursday, January 2, 2014
Life is what happens while you are making other plans, they tell me. This season has been loaded with distractions. I worked a lot of late hours at Gunderson, Inc. where I was teaching classes on Welding Supervision.
Two young fellows were coming to the house a couple of times per week to work on instruments they were building. One was working from a kit, but had zero experience with tools, so it required a great deal of personal attention; the other built from scratch, and is nearly finished with a very nice 15-5/8" viola, a fairly faithful copy of the 1580 Gasparo da Salo viola. (Funny, when those young fellows are here, I don't get a thing done on my own work.) I did begin three 5-string fiddles, months ago, but have only made measurable progress on one; the Spalted Maple 5 string fiddle.
I took two weeks vacation between Christmas and New Years, but ended up being sick nearly the whole time. Besides, my daughter was home from school for that two weeks, so I had reason to be distracted. :-) I did get a couple of work days in, but it has been a struggle.
Finally, I have several repair jobs going, each of which really needs to be done, so, to make a long story slightly shorter, things haven't turned out as planned.
The maple for the one-piece back is some Oregon Big Leaf Maple that was given to me by a local landowner and forester a few years ago. This is the third instrument I have made from that tree. It is a relatively soft maple, and has had a very nice tone, so far, in my experience. I have made one five string fiddle from it, and one cello.
The Spruce is Sitka-- a one-piece sitka front plate-- only the second time I have ever seen one, and it is some of the toughest spruce I have ever worked with, which I think will make a good, thin, top plate for the instrument, as I have made one instrument before with very similar spruce, and it turned out a winner, as a bluegrass, celtic and country fiddle. But it was not fun cutting the double purfling by hand, as every "winter grain" was so hard it would catch the knife blade and try to turn it. However, here is the progress so far:
Today I will make the final corrections on the front and back arching and cut in the f-holes (I hope), then begin graduating the front plate. Hopefully, by next week I can have the corpus nearly completed. Maybe somewhere in there, I can get a good run at the other two fiddles, as well. I really need all three completed by the time of the show in April. There will be about 500 people per day through that show, and some of them will be fiddlers. :-)
We will see; I am feeling somewhat less than optimistic, however, after the experiences of the last three months.
Thanks for looking.
Chet
2 comments on “Five String Fiddle (slowly) coming along”
fiddleiphile Says:
Sunday, January 5, 2014 @2:11:53 AM
Wow!! Beautiful work Chet.
Chet Bishop Says:
Sunday, January 5, 2014 @8:08:16 AM
Thanks, my friend.
I had a set-back yesterday; I went to remove the mold and did not realize that hide-glue had seeped between the mold and the ribs in two places, so I broke two ribs. (sigh...) :-) Gotta make new ribs. This spalted maple seems a good deal more fragile. The back does have a really nice ring to it, but the fragility scares me. Not sure I will do this again.
Chet
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