Plans are an invaluable source of knowledge about many old instruments, and I like to gather them, but I think it is a poor choice to use them as physical templates. Far more useful, when working “after” an antique instrument documented in a competent drawing, is to study the drawing, both systematically with good questions in mind, and just looking and absorbing, and to come up with observations that allow the maker then to apply what might likely have been the intended “ideal” layout by using appropriate techniques.

This would include determining what might likely have been the original maker’s working shop-inch, whether proprietary and ad-hoc or perhaps based upon a local standard, determining scaling and plucking points, side-draught angles, all that sort of stuff, but then implementing the knowledge derived from this examination and reflection using appropriate layout tools and methods. Here’s a very minor example:  I have a very fine drawing, sold to me as a pdf which I can print whenever I want, or study on-screen, of the Stuttgart “big walnut,” attributed to Claude Labreche. I noticed that his soundboard grain was angled to the spine at an angle of approximately 12º, but I also noticed that he cleverly seemed to use about 12º as the side-draught angle between bridge and hitchpins for both the 8’ and 4’ strings. Well, instead of punching out bridge and hitchpin positions using the drawing as a template, I proceeded as I had inferred that Labreche did: I positioned the hitchpins simply by eye-balling and tracking the string following the stripes of soundboard grain. 

Again, a nearly trivial example, but it illustrates the general principle. Similarly, I observed his angle from nut to tuning-pin, and then applied that using angle-bevels and half-diameter spacer-shim to mark-out the tuning pins “from scratch” following his choices as I interpreted them.

owen

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