I think you have a very 'sound' grasp on the subject (pun intended). You will likely build some of the best playing cues ever. You seem to be educated in an area that the majority of cue makers ignore or discount. I have for years studied & experimented in attempt to educate myself and find patterns in harmonics that equate to playability. I have done pretty well & built some great playing cues. But your experience & knowledge is another level altogether. I'll be interested in seeing how you progress as a builder, and hopefully someday get a chance to sit down & have a beer with you if our paths ever cross.
Eric, thank you for the kind words. They are just what I needed, as I seem to be stalled in this whole pursuit at this point. Still no electric in the new shop as the young man I was paying to do this up and left, leaving me with coils of Romex coming out of every outlet. I am not an electrician. Anyway, sorry for what follows, but I just had to get it out...
You got me to thinking: "Why not start roughing shafts out by hand?"
This is the
only way to make a violin bow. They do not lend themselves at all to machine production, not fine bows at any rate. Every step of the way the work is done with simple block planes, scraping planes, knives and files, guided entirely by the eye except for the very final taper, which is done with either a set of graduated gauges, with a dial caliper, or with both.
All along the way, you are constantly getting feedback from the wood, either by thumping it against your hand or just by listening to the tone of the wood as you plane it. The tools will speak to you if you listen to them. You are always holding it in your hands, flexing it and noticing how the strength and sound changes as it gets thinner. Your subconscious records all of these details, but you have to listen and feel for them. Trust me, they are there. With the "traditional" method of cue making with machinery, it's kinda hard to do that over the sound of the lathe and a screaming router, very far removed from your sensitive fingertips.
Another thing that I intend to carry over into cue building is to avoid any semblance of mass production. All of the great bow makers made only one stick at a time. This is the only way to keep these tiny details that each stick presents to you fresh in your mind.
Bow making is fiendishly difficult. There is 0.000% room for error as you reach the last stages, and any mistake - even one careless stroke of the file - will quickly send the stick out to the garden to stake up your tomatoes.
You start out with about 1/4 pound or so of pernambuco wood, and spend several hours roughing it out, leaving it oversized in all dimensions. If there is anything that feels wrong with the stick at this point, is goes in the scrap bin. Then you have to put a substantial bend in the wood using heat. About 1/3 of all sticks break at this point, revealing hidden shakes and checks that "healed" themselves to the examining eye (you guys all know how frustrating tropical hardwoods can be). These go into the wood stove. You get about 17 seconds worth of heat from a cracked $150 bow blank.
After heating and bending, the bow blank will be horribly twisted. You make no effort to prevent this, in fact, you want it to happen since it relieves hidden stresses in the wood which would just cause it to warp in the future. There are fine bows in existence that are over 200 years old and are still straight as an arrow and twist free when viewed from the top, in spite of them being under tension from the hair all the time they are being played (the depth, of course, has a substantial curve as part of the design). Makes me wonder how a cue can get a serious warp in it after just being laid at an angle against a wall.
The twists are all planed out by hand and eye, forming the initial octagonal cross-section of the bow. These initial lines will guide you throughout the slow graduation process. The beauty and flow of these lines as they develop will be reflected in beauty of the final bow... even though the facets are planed off of about 90% of finished bows, leaving a round cross-section. The curve and taper of a fine bow is so profoundly beautiful to an experienced expert that their eye will be instantly drawn to it upon entering into the workshop as it rests against a wall amid inferior bows.
All this time, you are constantly weighing the stick and balancing it on the fly. The finished bow must be as close to 60-62 grams as you can get it, or no player will buy it. There is about 37 grams of stick in a finished violin bow, give or take a gram or two. The rest is the adjusting frog, button, hair and grip. There are no "weight bolts" allowed in a bow, the stick
must be carved in such a way that it arrives at artistic perfection at the same time it arrives at functional perfection.
As challenging and rewarding as bow making has been to me, it is ultimately kinda boring. They are supposed to be simple, unadorned tools, and no individual artistic freedom is accepted by the profession. Even the accepted models are rigidly defined, with only copies of the styles of masters long deceased being tolerated.
Imagine if every cue you made just had to look like a particular Rambow or no one would want it? And then there is the matter of there being only one hardwood in the world that is acceptable for a modern bow, and only a very tiny percentage of this wood being suitable for an artist grade bow... and
all of this wood being both CITES protected and subject to the importation rules of the Lacey Act. There is
no first quality pernambuco available for sale in this country that I know of, and I am all out of first quality wood.
Anyway, sorry for the very long, odd rant on a kiln-drying thread in a cue building forum, but Eric got me thinking, and this info seems relevant to cue building to me. There may be more than one way to skin a shaft, and this might be a great time for me to investigate this. I'm told that most of the great snooker cues are made by hand, and they seem to shoot pretty straight for guys like Ronnie O.
BTW Eric, I would definitely love to share some brews and conversation with you. I am saddened that you found it necessary to halt your cue building, but the river of life takes us along in its powerful currents like leaves on the surface. We are lucky enough if we can even influence our paths, but inexorably, we are all eventually washed to the sea.
Good luck in your future endeavors, Eric, and I sincerely hope that life will carry you back into cue building. If for no other reason, I would really like a Sugar Tree of my own some day.