Luddites: Is Change Necessary? Pt.3b

I've just talked about the example of a violininst, and how being conservative in selection of woods and methods was not just preferable but essential. Tradition in his case was not a nasty word, does not denote recalcitrance but rather a steady and focused effort to retain the necessary outcome! the customer isn't looking for a suprise, but an instrument that will take its place in an orchestra with the goal of complementing a time proven sound.

We might think that a complex task like beginning with a block of wood and ending with the curved back of the violin body with uniform thickness could be done much easier than with chisels , shaved and shaved by hand! If Orange County Choppers can place an aluminum billet in a CNC machine and produce a perfectly sculpted motorcycle wheel, why can't we do the same with a block of wood? We could, but the result wouldn't be the same..

Now consider with me a carpenter using a hand plane to true up a door; at one time he'd have a long plane in his truck just for this purpose, now he'd have a power plane. However, if you or i wewre to take several passes of the plane down the length of the door, and then checked it, we'd find that the edge was getting off square, we'd see daylight under the try square, and that we'd taken off more in areas where we'd pressed harder. A true carpenter knows how to set the door firmly, and how to hold the plane firmly and press down as the plane moves away from his body. He'll retest as we would, but his eye would tell him a great deal about how uniform the passes were. He'd also watch the thickness of the curls coming off the plane, adjusting each pass to correct any distortions caused by the last pass.

The apprentice violin maker has a much more difficult task; shaping the curved back of the instrument with a variety of gouging and scraping tools, measuring constantly to ensure the thinkness ends up uniform throughout, reading the wood for direction of grain, etc

Work in Progress