The making of a violin maker

A bit of an update involving material goods and no electrons and logic gates. 

Wednesday grabbed some aluminium from the workshop and asked the technician to fix the new bearings I got for my bandsaw. Somehow the ID is in inches but the OD is in mm. That means factory bearings don't fit and I need to grind them to size. However, the bandsaw got new blade and orange tires, and it's finally cutting straight and smooth. What a difference it makes. There is some resonance on the vertical normal mode when I cut though,  the hole thing tends to move up and down like 1mm when I'm cutting wood at a certain speed. Any ideas how to fix that? 

Well, with the bandsaw working properly I can cut the mould for the violin we are planning on making with Nico. He's been learning how to draw violins with dividers and that's what we did on the metal plate:

I don't have a fret saw, so most of the time we spend it with the file. If somebody wants to make me a present a knew concepts would be appreciated here.

 After lots and lots of filing with the coarsest one I've got, we tried to leave everything 2mm oversized. It started to look like a violin.

 It may need some more care on the edge but it lives on the workshop already.

 Close up of the corners so you can check how precise you can work by file alone. Well, and some dowelled sandpaper.

 As you get closer and closer to the line, it takes more and more time to do a proper job

 here still need some 20 min of work.

I thought it was going to be much more difficult and time consuming, but you can finish this in an afternoon. A set of different size curved files would be handy too. 

With this mould, I will transfer the size to the wooden piece that you see on the background (bolivian cedar) and cut it. We are going for metal templates, wooden moulds, and no clamps for the glue up.  Thicknesser a la Stradivari and local woods for the body. Repeat in spirit what the old guys did. Oh, if you are sending me the fret saw as present, can you add some animal glue to the package? I cannot find in Chile and my marriage is too fragile to start cooking hide in the house. Patience has a limit too. 

I want to make another one on brass now. 

Hopefully with this new tag I can keep track of all the side projects necessary to make a violin. As you can guess by now, I'm not so interested in how to make a violin but in how to make a workshop that makes violin makers. That's what this is about. Let's see if tomorrow the mould is done.