Today started out with the plan being to cut out the inside mold for the violin. It didn’t turn out that way. After spending close to an hour installing the new 1/8 inch blade on the band saw and getting everything squared up I rough-cut out the form but didn’t go back and finish the job. Instead, I spent an hour or so trying to figure out how to use my new sharpener to sharpen Plane Irons. I managed to come up with a system that works better than doing it completely free hand, but still not close to perfect. After just having bought the WorkSharp WS2000, I’m still hesitant to go out and spend a bunch more money on a different sharpening system so I’ll keep trying until I succeed, run out of patience, or run out of Plane Iron.
Before I did the rough cut of the mold, I jury-rigged a dust collector system for the band saw using my shop-vac. The system, as crude as it was, worked great!
The big success of the day was that I build a wood bending iron out of a stained glass soldering iron, a 3/4 ID thick walled brass riser, and a few other components. It includes a dimmer switch which presumably will allow me to control the temperature, or at least the rate at which the Iron heats.
A lesser accomplishment, though still time consuming was purchase of all the parts I need for both the elastic band clamps for the bouts as well as the parts for 20 luthier clamps (more on that later).
Finally, today was a violin lesson day.
Here’s the video with me playing in the background to torture you 😉
Oh, by the way, I have a huge, infected, nasty looking blister from all the planing I did yesterday… I may have the mind of a carpenter, but I have the hands of an engineer.
joe
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