Daily Archives: October 22, 2023

This cello had another cello dropped on it! Luckily the damage was fairly minor – a crack in the side and an unglued seam. I got everything repaired and also fitted a new soundpost as well as adjusting the string heights at bridge and nut.

This violin came into the workshop because the owner wasn’t fully satisfied with the tone and playability. It turned out that the soundpost was badly positioned, which was the main issue. Also the fingerboard needed reshooting, and was very twisted toward the bass side of the instrument creating the need to reach over quite far to play the G string.

I reshot the board and managed to mostly address the twist at the same time as well as tweaking the width at the end to make it point slightly more centrally relative to the body.

The string slots at the nut had also been placed very far off-centre in order to account for one of the pegbox walls being overly thick.

Unfortunately this was the opposite asymmetry to that which existed in the bass bar and bridge placement, leading to the strings visibly running diagonally across the neck. We decided the best approach was to tastefully widen the pegbox enough that a symmetrical nut could be fitted.

The final piece of the puzzle was tweaking the location of the endpin hole, which was actually fitted off centre relative to the body anyway and was putting uneven strain on the tailpiece. (Oh and some bridge modifications to account for the tweaked fingerboard twist!)

This viola came in because the neck had come unglued. Thankfully the glue had failed without any wood breaking, so it was a fairly easy fix. I also treated it to its first new soundpost since 2002 when it was made!