Since my last post I have worked on the large scale body work. I measured the size of the 1/4" audio jack and went about drilling and dremeling a hole in the underside of the violin. It's definitely not the nicest looking cut out but it'll be closed up, so I don't have to worry about the look of it. Once the hole was large enough for the jack to fit inside, I measured where the output hole would line up on the sidewall and drilled it out. I'm not quite sure what I'll put over the cutout but it'll probably just be a metal plate.
The next step was drilling out the holes for the tuners. I brought it in to work to use my company's drill press in the machine shop because this step is particularly important and should be as precise as possible. The holes need to be big enough to accommodate the tuning pegs but not too big as to cause the pegs to wobble and also the hole needs to be perpendicular to the backside of the headstock so that the tuners sit flush. In any regard, a hand drill and small selection of drills bits wouldn't be the best choice for these.
So, in our wonderful machine shop, I had access to the drill press which made this whole process very easy. The only draw back was that the machine shop has hundreds of drill bits with differences in the thousandths of an inch(.001). It was just a matter of starting small and working my way up to the proper size. I had already laid out where the tuning holes needed to be and simply lined things up to drill.
In the lower picture, if you look closely, you'll see that the tuners aren't screwed in permanently. Yet in the upper picture, the violin is turned over and the tuners didn't fall out! I think this shows I've done it right, at least gravity alone can't pull them out.
Now that those things are done, I've got a lot of sanding to do, a bit of neck work to finish, and then a bit of gluing. Hopefully this will be done sooner rather than later!
Pretty impressive on the audio jack, Benn, that's a lot of material to hog out by hand with a Dremel. To space the tuning pegs, were you able to find some sort of standard online or take measurements off beth's violin to assure your string spacing will be in the right area?
ReplyDeleteDon't worry it wasn't all removed by a dremel, I taped some drill bits to the depth that I wanted and made guide holes. Both to make sure I didn't go too far and also to remove a good portion of the wood.
ReplyDeleteAs for the string spacing, the distance from the pegs to the nut was just for aesthetic. But for the distance between the strings where they cross over the nut, I'll have a list of measurements I'll have to attend to.