Jim McKean's Page

The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things: of ships, and sails, and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. The time has come to finish this cello. The first step, once the varnish is dry, is to finish the fingerboard. I plane the surface, scrape it, sand it and then polish it to a high sheen. Then I break the edge, using a plane:

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The next step, now that the cello is all done in the white, is varnishing. It’s one of those truisms that actually does happen to be true: the varnish is the defining factor in an instrument’s sound. Both its dynamic range – its timbre – and its decibels. This is because the sound is created by the vibration of the wood; and all surface coatings have a damping effect. By their very nature, they reduce the vibration.

The idea is to minimize the effect. Well, good news and bad news. The good news… Continue

Now that the fingerboard has been glued on, and the neck root planed to the proper taper, we can go ahead and set the neck. This is a critical step – the vibration of the body depends on the pressure the strings exert, and that is directly a result of the neck setting. Basically, the steeper the neck angle, the more tension – the result being a sharper, more focused sound. Up to a point; too much pressure, and the thing just locks up. The tolerances are measured in millimeters. I’ll get more int… Continue

The next step in making the scroll is to carve the comb – the double groove that runs up the spine. I lay out the centerline using a footlong section of an old tape measure that fell by the wayside after yeoman service. The scroll is close to completion, which means that if a tool slips I would have limited ability to make the oopsies vanish with some creative reshaping (that? Of course I meant it to look like that. It reminds me of when Yale University commissioned a work from Marcel Duchamp th… Continue

The next step, after finishing the pegbox, is the final shaping of the volute. As you saw in the last posting, I’ve already roughed out the first turn --- just enough to give me room to work on the pegbox. But now it’s time to finish it. But it’s more difficult than it seems. It looks like an unwinding spiral, one long curve, and it is. You can see, starting with the small outside bit – called the ear – how the curve gradually opens up as it loops around:

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