Recent content by Exluthier

On any brass components of music instruments, we suspended any replacement parts over dishes of human urine; very easily obtainable in any workshop environment ... Best not to put the leftovers on your chips, though!

Altogether fascinating and informative thread; thanks to all who contributed!

Do please guard your thumb joints carefully! The surgeons tell me that the joint replacement operations now happening in the USA are not yet considered reliable enough for UK surgeons to consider. There are good scraper benders available, and simple copies are easy to make.

This morning, at a shed somewhere in England, were nine shedders, two of them making king-size trugs for a local project, another one soldering an arduino-based light cube display, one making a new handle for a keyhole saw, one looking for lathe faceplates, one refurbishing a music-stand, and...

This player isn't playing clawhammer style, she's frailing.

The water key on mine is a lot lower down than yours …

I’ve been late in providing what I hope will be a helpful reply to this thread, by the thought of the possible volume of flak I might receive, but here goes. I am a luthier, and have never made a guitar of any kind, yet there has been almost no reference to any other instrument than the guitar...

Yep! ‘In glue and dust we put our trust’! But just a (repeated, with apologies) note about PVA glues; the ones with the aromatic bond at molecular level (usually the white PVA glues) are not waterproof and will readily creep under clamping pressure. The yellow PVA glues are more waterproof (...

I have always used hide glues of various strengths, but have varied the strength by simple dilution of the completed glue batch. Glue manufacturers now advertise their various strengths, which I’m sure some people rely on, but whenever I’ve needed glues that formed slightly less strong bonds...

It’s Knew Concepts for me, too; very high blade tension and a very rigid frame, even on the aluminium-framed models.

Was Luan not a Shorea species; perhaps Acuminata? Used to use it for lightweight internal lute moulds / formers.

I'm with Jim B; Although Charles H Hayward's book may not reference new polymers, etc., it provides a complete guide to the techniques involved in basic staining and polishing, and is the best start I can think of for the work.

Accepted, but the issue is one of pronunciation, not spelling. No speaker of either Swiss German (of any Canton) or of any German variant could make the word Dorf sound like Dov. There’s a great big rhotic (or guttural, in some dialects) ‘R’ sound in the middle of it, and the O vowel sound is...

The correct spelling of the word for a bit of a dummy is actually Dof, and not `Dorf’ ...

What you're writing about is referred to as a lace, but I'm not sure that the EMS stocks anything like that, or ever has. It was a feature of many earlier instruments, and I don't know if anyone does it now, other than in restoring historical instruments, To answer your questions: 1. Yes, it's a...