Finishing of the head

 The head is getting there, just need some cleaning. I love that bit when I can fancy myself a bit of a perfectionist!
Gouges are good even for the finishing, especially when we are after leaving tool marks, like me, which really give character to a scroll. I also use scrapers (on the right) to erase some of the gouge marks. I never use sand paper in any part of my instruments, this would ruin the texture of the wood under the varnish and make the whole instrument bland.

Scroll Carving - Second turn and eye.

Once I was happy with my first turn, making sure the symmetry was as good as my eye could tell, I carried out the carving of the second turn. At that point I find it usually necessary to improve the face view as I go along. This has to be done just by eye - templates can't help me there.

 There is then a lot of work to be done around the button of the head in order to prepare it for the back fluting and for it to be blended into the shape of the neck a little bit later on.

For me it is important to also start the fluting of the turns, the fluting of the front and back and the chamfer. It does produce a better scroll when these area are all worked on at once, but that means doing a lot of juggling and it's hard going for the brains !

In the meantime...

While I was totally immersed in making my best cello scroll yet, Douglas wasn't day dreaming. After the hard work of "thicknessing" the rib wood to sheets, came the time of bending them. The first job in that category is to shape the inside of the corner blocks (and some like me also likes shaping the top and bottom blocks at that point) and give them the gracious flow of the "C" bouts. A fair bit of the "look" of the body of the instrument is determined by that particular central part... And that is another place were the style of the maker can be strongly expressed. In this particular case, and for consistency, Douglas just followed my templates.

The "C" ribs are carefully bent one by one. They are usually all glued when each one of them has been bent and then the maker can call it quite a  day !

The next step is to trim them and to shape the outside of the corners. There are two reasons why the outside of the corners are not shaped at same time as the inside. The first reason is because when the "C" ribs are glued and clamped, a lot of pressure is applied on the blocks and we cannot think of having a pointy corner there that would break for sure. The other reason is that when the outside of the block is shaped, the "C" rib is shaped with it so the outside rib overlaps the inside and the joint is less visible.

At that point the body of the cello starts looking excitingly like what it will be finished... with a bit of imagination... When the rib structure and the head and neck are finished, we can safely say that half of the instrument is completed. This is not quite it with us, but we can kind of see it coming.

Douglas likes bending all the "outside" ribs first and then glues them all at once. I would bend and glue as I go. We use a "bending iron" which goes up to 250ºc, although we seldom use that temperature. The rib wood is dampened and carefully bend hot to match the shape of the mould. This is a very tricky and fiddly job where time limit has to not come into consideration. Rushing the job could also result in breakage of the rib which would be a disaster when you think how long it takes to prepare it ! Finding the perfect balance between bending from the inside of the rib and then from the outside is what will bring it to marry the curves of the mould.

Scroll Carving - First turn.

Scroll Carving

Even long before thinking I would become a violin maker, I was carving wood.
Giving a shape to a block of material or carving right into it fascinates me. So when we come to heads, I feel in my element (I don't say that I don't pressurize myself to the highest beauty!)
I like carving scrolls commonly found on instruments of the quartet, I like too the more challenging head carving found more often on viols. I like both equally. I wish I would be asked more often to carve heads rather than scrolls. One day maybe...

Carving a scroll is much faster than carving a head, but in many ways, it can go wrong easier : there is much more roughing out and a much more extended use of the saw. One has to be extremely careful in making sure to cut right and rough out delicately. Also, it is more likely to be on scrolls that asymmetry and irregularities look like mistakes ! So I cannot rush on this one !!

Fun starts on the head

This time I decided that I was going to carve out the inside of the pegbox (that is the mortice were we can access to the pegs when we want to put strings on or change them) before bringing the walls of the pegbox to their definite shape.
So far, I was taught and accepted that we carve the outside of the pegbox and from that form, we draw and carve the inside. But I actually don't think it is a rule.
And in fact, in everything, conceiving a piece from its center line is a better guarantee for symmetry
Besides, carving the inside of the pegbox is a rough job where very sharp chisels are just not enough for me. So I go back to woodcarving core techniques and use a small hammer to tap on my chisel. One who uses these techniques, though has to remember that wood is made of fibers and these could break or tear under shock. So the hammering stays very mild and the chisels should be razor sharp. Having the walls of the pegbox at the original thickness helped to support the wood where I was working on it.
I spent a whole half a day alone just sharpening three of my chisels and carving out the pegbox took me a couple of days.

For the pegbox itself, I am (loosely) copying the measurements of one of Stradivari's heads - So I can't really go wrong !

Work on the head

I am lucky enough that my husband Douglas Macarthur is one of the best violin makers of the area. Since we like working together, we decided to make Victoria's cello together as we have done, very successfully, before.
The head and neck parts of the instrument are not really the bits most makers start the building with, but there is no rule. In our case, I'm waiting for Douglas to have finished his latest violin so that he can help with the very physical work of starting the body parts of the cello.
The nice bit is that the "wait" means working on the head... one of the bits I prefer working on. Of course it does include some physical roughing out... I don't think any part of a cello doesn't start with physical work...

Once the neck block was squared up, I did saw around the head and neck and that was me back at squaring. This means that all around the cut has to be square with the sides (again to make sure the scroll / head is straight and ultimately the pegs don't look like they point in every direction).