Milled pegbox

MIlling marks inside an early- to mid-20th century factory violin. Usually these are eliminated in the finishing process, to give a more hand-made effect.

Plastic volute

Going through some used rental instruments and found this 1/8-size 1989 Suzuki violin with a plastic volute. You can see the wood-plastic joint at about 9 o'clock on the outer term, and if you look closely, you can follow the line up and around the curve. Apparently the scroll is cut relatively flat, then this plastic volute was glued into place. Easy to miss with a quick glance, though I suppose the colors have faded differently over the years.

An Oud

It's nice to get something different every so often. Here's a customer's oud that needed a little repair, clean-up, and stringing. Compared to a fiddle, this is one complicated pegbox -- 11 strings!



Thank goodness for the internet, where one can find some details on instruments that are unfamiliar to us. Really makes one wonder how repair folk in the 'old' days figured out what to do. The mechanics were straight-forward, but I had no idea on the tuning, and it turns out there are many.