🦋 Violin Repair notes
Well... that modification I made to my fiddle's bridge last month did not work out so well, as it turns out. Some notes on what came of it and what I think my mistakes were. What I did was to take a small amount of material off the top of the bridge to lessen the vertical pressure on the bridge so that it would not buckle. However, I was not thinking about how the tension of the strings has to remain constant (assuming they are to be in tune, which is desirable); so relieving the vertical pressure on the bridge would put additional horizontal pressure on the tailpiece.  After a couple of weeks I noticed that it was getting difficult to keep my violin in tune; "difficult" soon became "impossible" and I had to sit down and figure out what was going on. Some examination of the instrument made it clear that the tailpiece was no longer fixed stably to the body. So I got a chance to learn about how tailpieces are connected to violins: There is a little piece of vinyl cord called a tail gut, with threaded connectors on each end, that go into holes in the end of the tailpiece. On a traditional violin this cord loops around the end pin; on my Stroh fiddle as you can see to the left, it loops around a bolt in the violin body (usually covered by a metal attachment for the chin rest). Tail guts are cheap, which is useful as I went through a couple before figuring out that the problem was the bridge... Now I have a brand-spanking new bridge (manufactured by Aubert, courtesy of Menzel Violins -- not expensive and vastly better than the bridge that came with the fiddle) and everything is looking shipshape. I'll be jamming with Mountain Station this afternoon and see how it sounds... A few things I learned about my violin: - I need to pay attention to the way the strings are wrapped on the pegs. I sort of knew this as an abstract rule but had not really been following it.
- The bridge is not bilaterally symmetrical. The bass side is higher than the treble side, and putting it on the violin backwards is a mistake.
- It's important to keep the bridge perpendicular to the body of the violin. It has a tendency to lean forward as you tighten the strings, and you need to correct for this.
posted morning of Sunday, October second, 2011
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(Also along the way, I had a try at carving a bridge for myself; but that ended badly.)
posted morning of October second, 2011 by Jeremy
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