This log was cut around 12 years ago. It's well seasoned and has an ideal density. The grain is also distinctive and rare. Although the wood is made of spuce the grain is more suggestive of pine. Apparently, a few trees in this area of British Columbia look like that. This wood comes from the same log as the wood on the cello that I am currently making. We will have to wait until it's varnished this summer to see how handsome this type of wood looks when finished.
I ordered a cello top and here's what showed up. These massive pieces of wood are barely going to work. Once I match the grain and remove the dirt, knots, fungus, cracks and everything that doesn't run straight, I will have just enough material.
This log was cut around 12 years ago. It's well seasoned and has an ideal density. The grain is also distinctive and rare. Although the wood is made of spuce the grain is more suggestive of pine. Apparently, a few trees in this area of British Columbia look like that. This wood comes from the same log as the wood on the cello that I am currently making. We will have to wait until it's varnished this summer to see how handsome this type of wood looks when finished. As it turn out, it's becoming Graduation Week here in the shop. That's my cello back resting on top of the bench. I'm removing the inside material so that I end up with a piece of wood that is concave on one side and convex on the other. Various areas in that piece of wood need to end up at different thicknesses called graduations. The amount of material I remove, and where I remove it will determine the way the back vibrates, and along with the vibrations of the top, the sound will be produced. All well and good, except that I remove the wood by hand primarily by using two hand planes. I thought it would take me a morning and half an afternoon to do the graduation, so I thought yesterday was "graduation day". Shortly after noon, due to the physical nature of the work, I could do no more. I resumed graduating this morning and called it quits again this afternoon before I pulled a muscle or injured a tendon. Perhaps tomorrow I will finish the graduations. I'm at the fun part now. I will remove minor amounts of material from different areas to get the wooden back to flex appropriately, achieve a desired weight range and produce a certain tone when I tap on it. Then I will give my muscles and joints a few days to recover. The good news is that I think I can finish and play this cello (without varnish) by the end of January.
There's always and abundance of everything when making a cello. In this case lots of chips. There's also an abundance of physical effort that goes into removing the wood from these massive boards. As it turns out, I may not use the top you see on the bench on the current cello in progress. The wood for the back of the cello has turned out to be quite dense, so I may be pairing it with a denser spruce top. However, this top is veryimpressive from a tonal perspective and I may decide to go with it after all. Even though I don't plan to do any varnishing until late spring, I'm thinking about colours now. It's fun to experiment and compare the results of different combinations of paints, pigments and mediums. I wanted to try blending coccineal (cactus bug secretion) and pthalo blue with my characteristic red/brown colours. The results were not what I expected, but they never are. I made a madder lake (from madder root) last month and was anxious to compare it to the commercial ones I had in stock. It's more orange than the others but I think it will be quite attractive on a violin. However, curiosity got the better of me and I've ordered madder root from a source in India. I want to see if the madder lake that I make from this root will produce a different result and whether the result will be acceptable.
I cooked some more varnish. I wasn't going to do it until springtime, but the fall weather has been wonderful and Illyas Pagonis wandered into my life. Illyas has a background in curating, art history and painting. He also makes bazoukis and violins. Lately he's been experimenting with various historic varnish recipes and ingredients. I got caught up in the excitement and decided to make some varnish of my own. I changed my method somewhat, and used a thermometer which gave me greater control over the cooking temperature. The result appears to be very acceptable and it's always a bonus when nothing catches fire in the process. It's also a bonus when the neighbours are blissfully unaware of the smell of linseed oil smoking away at 500+ F temperatures for several hours.
I also made a madder lake for the first time. It reminds me of the wine making process, except you use caustic ingredients and ground up roots, and what you throw away in wine making, you keep for making the madder lake. It took about a week to dry the sediment and the result is a pigment that closely resembles Transparent Red Oxide, which is a colour I use a lot in my work. It wasn't the colour I was trying for, but it's a colour I can work with. I look forward to the clarity that a madder lake pigment provides. It should pair nicely with my latest handcrafted varnish but I will have to wait until varnish season next spring to find out. |
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