Arching the plates

The machine-carved arching roughly corresponded to Messiah templates, sans fluting. It was basically half-finished arching that could be made to comply to the templates with more wood removed. That was a pleasant surprise.

Fluting directions are in Michael Darton's book in the edges chapter at violinmag.com.

I cleaned it up with scrapers, by eye using dim lighting at an angle, by feel with my hands. Then I did a rough marking of the arches using an embarrassingly makeshift technique that still helped.

Normally, arching is usually marked and completed before the plates are hollowed out underneath, so you have a flat surface to mark from. At least, it appears most marking jigs use this, and therefore you have to improvise when doing a kit. Ideally, you could clamp a pencil in a router or drill press and slide the plate around on a piece of MDF. But I don't have one yet, so I clamped the pencil to the overhang of the toe-kick ledge of my kitchen island and slid the plate around on the floor to mark it. It looked ridiculous but it worked.







Use a light hand when you mark -- start with the maple back to practice on -- because if you aren't careful you can gouge and stain the spruce. In fact, use a light hand on the spruce in general especially when using the scraper, to avoid tear-out. Using the scraper almost feels more like brushing away crumbs of wood than carving. Be gentle.


Edit: I should have followed the templates more carefully. So much emphasis is put on graduation, but Strads have been regraduated and still sound so amazing -- arching however can't be changed (besides sinking with time) so that must be more influential than the interior graduation. And yet many makers practically eyeball it, as I mostly did here. Just use a mathematically optimized cycloid template, not an exact transcription of an already-sunken Strad. The making the violin templates do compensate which is good.