I wish that I could claim the work done on this old 'cello as income! It would make my bank account happier. While this repair is saving my wife well over $1000 in repair bills, I'm not "earning" any money off of it and other work is not getting done, either. This is not a complaint, but a reality of work. Oh, well...

Anyway, in preparation to gluing the top, often referred to as the "table", back onto the rims, I needed clamps. Lots of clamps. And not just any old pipe clamp but what are called "spool clamps" which keep the pressure right over the rim so that you don't damage the top or the back of the instrument.

So I had to make these. Normally the plates are circles, but I made crescents so that the clamping pressure wold be over a wider area. This was a simple matter of saving some money, have you ever priced out 8" long 1/4" bolts?! I did, so I bought threaded rod instead and cut it into 8" sections. Even so, I would have had to make twice as many clamps if I used circles for pads.

Took me well over a full day to make all of the parts and to assemble these clamps. I can see why some people just buy them.

Cork lining on the faces in order to protect the old finish.

The old glue is scraped clean off of the rims. Over the years previous repairs have just added new glue to old till the glue bond was 1mm thick! One of the consequences of that build up is that the gluing surface area would keep getting smaller and smaller. When I took the top off it was apparent that not a whole lot of glue was keeping this thing together!

Traditionally, hot hide glue is used as it is reversible. This means that repair work done in the future is possible without destroying the woodwork, and that's important when the instrument will survive for hundreds of years!

The downfall of hot hide glue is that you have a very short working time before it starts to gel, maybe one minute if you are lucky! With such a long glue bead to apply, all the way around the rim of the 'cello, I didn't have much time to apply the glue and then to correctly position and clamp the top, so I decided to use fish glue. Fish glue is much the same as hide glue but has a much longer working time. The slower set up and drying time means that clamping time is longer, too, but so what? You just arrange your schedule accordingly.

All glued, and clamped, and enhancing the scenery of the canoe shop.

Ah, the 'cello and the bass viol together.

There were more than a few spots on the 'cello's top that were questionable so I ensured that they were held secure. The traditional repair is to glue on, with hot hide glue, little squares of spruce whose grain runs across the split, then to bevel each side into as kind of little roof shape.

It is easy to see just how extensive the previous repair were! Rest assured that this 'cello sounded awesome even with all of those repairs, and I expect to still sound awesome once I am done.

This is the area which caused the initial concern. The spot to the the side of the end block had a some serious splitting occurring, as well as poor adhesion to the back. There was a piece of linen glued to the rib which was holding it from further splitting, but it wasn't doing anything for the rib to not buckle as it was. I replaced the cloth with some vertical pieces of spruce and increased the bonding area to the back by using dentellones. The original lining in this area was significantly damages and not doing its job at all. Dentellones are the traditional means of joining classical guitar tops to the sides. If somebody down the road doesn't like my choices then this can all be reversed without much fuss, which is precisely the reason that luthier still use hot hide glue!

Besides, I'm not this first one to work on the inside of this instrument...

I had a couple of violin repairs to do recently, too. This one is a little 1/2 size fiddle. It came in because of a series of unfortunate events. Awhile back the child's music teacher noticed that the string action was kind of high and mentioned this to the father. The father talked to one of the other dads at the class, who mentioned that he had just sanded down the top of the bridge. Well, this dad sanded down the bridge quite a lot! Probably a good 7-8mm. Unfortunately this still did not solve the problem. The bridge had been sanded down down so far that there was no more wood left to sand.

What everyone had failed to notice was that the real problem was that the violin neck had been knocked hard enough to break the glue joint at the button. This had released the back's ability to hold the neck in place, and the neck was now being folded forward! As it moved forward the strings would lift up, etc., etc..

So I re-glued the heel of the neck to the ribs and to the back. Now nice and solid I brought the strings back up to tension and quickly realized that they were bottoming out on the fingerboard. Why? Because the bridge was now way too low from being sanded down! So a new bridge is to be fitted.

While the shop is set up for lutherie I am finally getting to the repair of my wife's 200 year old 'cello. This old instrument is a Czech made copy of a large body Amati 'cello.

Before work commences...

A real problem area is the lower bout. There is some cracking in the wood, the belly and back plate are experiencing chronic glue failure, and this particular section is actually bending outwards.

With the top off I can examine the 'cello in its present state. Oh my...

It appears to have at least three sessions of work done previously. I judge this by the apparent age of the different repairs. This would help explain the chronic glue failures, each time the top was removed new glue was applied over the old glue. You can do this with Hot Hide glue, but as the glue builds up the surface areas tend to get smaller. Pretty soon you have very little glue holding it all together. This is supported in my mind as many places required very little effort open the glue joint. Too little effort.

There were some odd repairs done over the years...what is up with that multi-colour fabric?