Thinning ribs

Finally back to a little building work today, on the Medieval Fiddle. I cut the rib stock to near width, then planed it down to a bendable thickness with a toothed plane to avoid tear-out in the birds-eye maple.



Below is a close up of the tool-marks left by the toothed-plane blade. Often this is scraped down to a smooth surface in a violin, but I am going to leave these -- they'll be on the inside of the fiddle and virtually invisible -- but I'll know they're there, and smile. It seems very organic, primitive, real.



The 'birds-eye' figure shows up as little dots here -- birds' eyes! A highly non-uniform grain.