Purfling 1

After cutting out the back, it's time to get ready for purfling. You know purfling?Just in case, I'm going to explain. Purfling is a decoration which you can see on oloin, and viola, violincell, which looks like just a black line along the outline of violin and so on. It looks like just a line but actually it's made of two kinds of wood, black part is ebony, and white part is maple or white fiber. Originally, white part was made of maple. But using maple for purfling is little bit difficult, so recently almost everybody uses fiber type.

At first maker makes trench depth about 1.5mm to 2.0mm along the outline of back and table, and bend purfling material and put it inside of the trench. This process is quite difficult and takes so much time! And it requires much patience!
I wonder who likes this purfling process?! Of course some people might like it, because this part shows makers woodcraft skill so much. I still don't like it so much though ^^;)

Well, to start purfling, at first I have to shave edge part of back along the outline. Because the thickness of the edge part is still 30mm, and it's way thick. I have to decrease the thickness to about 3.5 to 4mm. To remove 25mm thickness of excess wood, I use power tools, chisels, small planes,...etc.
With checking the thickness of edge often, I make desired thickness by using file.
Actually, this took much time more than my expectation, it took almost half a day.
This time I want to make my violin really close to the real Stradivari's violin, so I made the thickness of the edge pretty carefully. According to a violin making book, it sais too easily, "thickness of edge should be 4.5 to 5mm".
In the past I followed this recipe, but this thickness is pretty thick, and I felt it's decreasing the vibration of back and table so much. And checking actual thickness of Stradivari and Guarneri, I noticed they never made such thick edge in their works.
This Stradivari 1721"Kruse"'s thickness in the C-part is 3.9 to 4.3mm, and other parts are about 3.5mm.

Fiouu, I finished all around the outline thickness arrangement! Well, next step is one of the most difficult part of making violin!
(Am I saying this almost every time??)