Violin Repair

Recently, my mother found an add for a violin on craigslist that claimed it was at least 100 years old. The label inside reads, "Antonius Stradivarius Cremonenfis Faciebat Anno 17." We decided to go pick it up and we paid a total of 70$ for it. The guy we bought it from bought it from someone else, and he had no knowledge of violins whatsoever. 

This is what we ended up with. The case looked like it was made out of armadillo, it was missing a string, the bridge wasn't on, and the fingerboard was hanging on by the last strands of glue.  The bow wasn't even a bow anymore, none of the hair was attached or anything. The rosin in the box has turned into something you'd see in a Jurassic Park movie, minus the mosquito in the middle. It had a serious need for repair.

 

This could have been a pretty expensive repair. We took it to our friend Ed, owner of "String Doktor," a private violin repairing business he runs. He told us that the chin rest was a 3/4 violin size (which if you know anything about violins, a full size is a 4/4 and what most adults and high schoolers use) which made it a size too small for me. The bridge it came with was also a size too small, so the strings were too close together when you played. We left it there over night and he glued the fingerboard back down for us.

When we went back the next day, we purchased Vision Solo strings for my main violin and transfered my old dominants over to the violin getting repaired, and added some fine tuners. He was able to fix my bridge where it had the correct spacing so we didn't have to replace it, and we added a chin rest... and it was ready to go. We just decided to scrap the bow, because it wasn't very good quality and the re-hair would cost more than it was worth. We spend 145$ total, 70$ of which was spent on strings and a little other maintance on my best violin. 

Job well done.