Violin Kit

Started on March 13, 2024: completed on May 12, 2024

The idea of actually building a violin was something of a long term goal – much further down the road. I imagine that I would have needed to build a good number of guitars before my skills were honed enough to take on something like a violin build – from scratch.

From what I see of the parts on a violin, there are a lot more finer details to carve out. This would probably be more of the violin head where it curls up.

One step I was looking to take towards violins was doing an archtop guitar course. I am interested in building some archtop guitars and the way the two instruments would be connected is that there is carving involved – the top and back sides of both instruments. It is possible that the body construction of the two instruments would be similar to each other as opposed to a non archtop guitar.

Just from a bit of research I did before purchasing the violin kit, I knew that there wasn’t much of any bracing in the violin. It is possible that this is why violins tend to crack the way they do.

There was some thoughts of trying to shape the kit violin similar to one of the Monkey logos. After doing a bit of staring at the two outlines, I scribbled some designs on how to try to make it work.

The easiest would be to just stain an outline of the Monkey logo on the top plate of the violin. But, this is not really what I had in mind at all. I really want the violin itself to be shaped untraditionally and be more monkey-like.

The idea would have been to hack the kit violin to make the monkey shape work but because of that, I would imagine the structural integrity would be compromised a lot since gluing parts together would be on arched areas as opposed to flat spots.

The Monkey Violin would be made from scratch and possibly using the guitar building method I know first. This would allow me to see if how it would turn out physically and possibly even let me not have to order in new tonewoods.

Another idea would be to just route the Monkey logo but it would have to be an electric violin since the shape of the instrument wouldn’t be a big factor in the sound it produces.

With that said, there will be most likely two monkey-shaped acoustic violins and one Monkey logo shaped electric violin in the future.

This kit violin may not be assembled to keep for resource pieces. The progress on it is intentionally slow.

*update April 27, 2024

After putting this on the back burner for a while, I decided to go back to it. I did consider to not put this together so I can have a violin I can look at for reference on the pieces. Running out of space is a good reason to put this together and get it out of the way.

*update May 12, 2024

The kit violin is now completed. I tried to stain the violin in a way to try to get a mixture of colours but it didn’t work out as I had hoped. I put on a brown stain on the bottom and then tried to get a little bit of raspberry in there but the raspberry went on heavier than I was hoping for. I do feel the back and ribs turned out okay in the end. I tried some metallic silver over the raspberry on the top plate: it also went on heavier than I wanted to.

A good thing about having a violin like this is that I get to practice carving/shaping bridges. I feel the bridge turned out well but looks like it is on the short side. I wouldn’t know for sure though.

After getting the D’Addario Prelude strings on, I tuned and tested the violin. It actually sounds good.

Overall, I can say that I am pleased with the build. Maybe I need to purchase some oil varnish and try another kit violin in the future.