Fixing the Masakichi violin

After I received the Masakichi No.A, I played a lot even though it had big split between back and ribs. Since my violin teacher recommended to close this big split, I was considering how to fix it. But At that time, I had almost no tools, even any clamps. So I had no idea how to fix this kind of thing.

I looked for an information about making and fixing violin. I found that fixers use kind of special glue for stringed instruments. The glue is not chemical product, but made from skin and bones of rabbit( it sounds bad, but this is really groval standard glue for luthiers). So I bought this special glue(it ’s called "NIKAWA" in Japanese).

And one more necessary thing was clamps. I didn’t know what kind of clamp is best for this, but I found a picture of special clamp to close sound box of violin on inter-net. This is actually sold at one internet shop. But it ’s kind of expensive!

So I decided to make this by myself. It seemed pretty simple and easy to make.
I bought cheap board and cut it into nice curved plates to fit the curve of violins lower and upper bouts. I couldn’t find nice hand screw like we can see in the picture, so I used 45mm long screws and butterfly type nut which I can screw by hand. But these screws were too heavy, because they had 10mm of diameter! Hihihi! It was silly to choose such thing for this. Mine was not sofisticated at all!!

Anyway I made my first fixing tool by myself. Unfortunately I already threw away it long ago, so I don’t have a picture of it.
C’est dommage… by using this pretty ugly tool, I could close the sound box successfully^^)
But the glue was kind of too thick! Hehehe! After drying it became thick white film on ribs.

Anyway, how was the sound after that? The player was feeling it’s little bit better than before, but actually he couldn’t feel much difference of it! Hehehe!