Linings, or slotting the hedgehog

With all the ribs bent and glued to the blocks, it's time to get the linings installed. Linings add strength to the ribs as well as increasing the gluing surface for the top and back seams.

Working down willow for linings is cheap thrills indeed -- it's always fun to peal off some long shavings. The linings are thinned to about 2 mm, bent, and inlet in to the corner blocks at the c-bouts.



The linings glued in on the top edge of the ribs, held in place with clothes pins reinforced with rubber bands -- fancy stuff indeed. Looks something like a porcupine or hedgehog with all the clamps in place. "Slotting the hedgehog" -- an old obscure violin-makers' phrase, perhaps something like this, perhaps not.

After the glue sets up overnight, I'll have to do the same thing to the bottom of the ribs. It's not a terrible task at all.

Two-thirds of the ribs in place.

I put the c-bouts in, then the upper bouts. This is the first time I'm seeing ribs on this form, and the compass arcs (from the drawing) really show up in the upper ribs, nice and round. I'm curious to see what the lower bouts look like with ribs in place.

If you didn't see it before and are wondering about the drawing of the form, my blog posts on that start here.

Planing rib-stock to thickness

Nothing terribly exciting -- thicknessing some rib stock. I use a toothed-blade in my block plane for this job. Next step is to cut them to width, then bend in the c-bouts.