I want to tell you about the moment I realised I had made a violin.
Not the moment I finished it. Not the moment I strung the last string or put the bridge in place. I mean the moment — maybe three weeks after all of that — when I was sitting with it in my hands, just holding it, and it hit me properly.
This thing... I made this.
Every curve of it. Every joint. Every millimetre of wood I carved away and every millimetre I was careful not to. I bent these sides with heat. I cut these f-holes with a knife. I reached inside this tiny wooden box — through a gap barely big enough for my hand — and wedged a small piece of wood in exactly the right place so that when a bow touches the strings, the sound goes where it's supposed to go.
I made this. From a piece of teak.
And sitting there holding it, I felt something I haven't felt in a long time. Genuinely, quietly proud. Not the loud kind of proud where you want to show everyone. The quiet kind. The kind that just sits in your chest and doesn't need anything from anyone.
That feeling — I want to tell you how I got there. The whole story. The stupid decisions, the moments of panic, the tools I used that were absolutely not designed for this, the times I nearly quit, and the thing that kept me going when I probably should have stopped.
This is that story. Welcome. I'm so glad you're here.
PART ONE: THE CLASS
"Three friends walk into a music institute…"
About a year ago, my friends Sanal and Aswin and I made a slightly ridiculous decision together.
We signed up for violin lessons.
Now — I need you to understand that none of us had any particular musical background. We weren't musicians. We weren't even especially musical people in the casual sense. We were just three grown adults who decided, somewhat spontaneously, that we wanted to learn the violin. Together.
And I love that about us, honestly. That we just... decided. No overthinking. No "are we too old for this?" No "do we have the talent?" We just registered and showed up.
The first class, they handed me a violin.
And I want to try to describe what that moment felt like, because I think it's important to the rest of this story. I'd seen violins before, obviously. I'd heard them. But I'd never actually held one. And the moment it was in my hands — I mean really in my hands, feeling the weight of it, the warmth of the wood, the way it fit against my chin when the teacher showed me the position —
Something happened.
It wasn't about the music. I hadn't played a single note yet. It was something more fundamental than that. It was this sudden, almost electric awareness of the object itself. Of what it was. A piece of wood — multiple pieces of wood, actually, shaped and joined and tuned — that could make that sound. That particular, aching, human sound that a violin makes.
And something in my brain said: I want to know how this was made.
Not in an academic way. Not "I want to read about it." More visceral than that. More like: I want to make one of these with my own hands.
And I want to be honest with you — the thought was immediately followed by doubt. Because that's what happens, right? You have an exciting thought and then your brain, which has been around long enough to know better, immediately starts listing reasons why it's a bad idea.
You've never made anything like this before.
You don't have the tools.
You don't have the training.
Who do you think you are?
That voice. You know that voice. Everyone who has ever tried to make something ambitious knows that voice.
And for a little while, I listened to it.
PART TWO: THE INSPIRATION
"When the idea finds you"
Around this time I was reading a book. Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Some of you will know it — it's a book about creativity and inspiration, and she has this idea that creative ideas are almost like living entities. They move through the world looking for the right person to bring them to life. And when they find their person — when you say yes to the idea — things start to happen.
I've always been a bit skeptical of that framing, honestly. I'm an engineer by instinct. I like physics. I like mechanisms. I like understanding why things work the way they do. So the idea of inspiration as a mystical force that moves through the universe looking for a host is... not naturally how I think.
But I'll tell you something. After I decided — really decided — to build a violin, things started to come together in a way that felt almost uncanny.
I found a website called makingtheviolin.com. I want to say that name clearly because I'm going to come back to it: makingtheviolin.com. Full-size printable templates. Step-by-step instructions. Materials lists. Photographs. Everything I needed, assembled in one place, apparently waiting for me.
I found a video series that walked through the process visually.
I found a supplier for the right strings.
I found someone locally who could help me source the right wood.
Now — I know the rational explanation. I know that these resources existed before I started looking, and that I simply wasn't paying attention to them. Confirmation bias. Selective attention. The information was there; I just wasn't tuned to receive it.
But here is what I've come to believe, whether or not it's strictly rational: it doesn't matter why the resources appeared. What matters is that you have to decide first. You have to commit before the path becomes visible. The commitment is what sharpens your attention. The commitment is what turns random information into useful signal.
So if you are sitting on an idea — if there's something you've wanted to make or build or learn — maybe the only thing standing between you and the resources you need is the decision. The actual, genuine decision to do it.
I made the decision. And then I went to find some wood.
PART THREE: CHOOSING THE WOOD
"Teak, jackfruit, and the joy of working with what you have"
Okay. Here's where I want to talk about something practical, because I think it's one of the more interesting decisions in this whole project.
A violin — a traditional European violin — is made from specific woods. The top plate, the soundboard, is spruce. Specifically, German spruce if you're going full traditional. The back plate and sides are maple. European maple. The fingerboard is ebony. There are good acoustic reasons for all of these choices. Centuries of accumulated luthier knowledge went into establishing this material list.
And almost none of it is easy to source if you're in Kerala.
So I had to think about this differently. I started researching what South Indian violin makers use. And what I found was really interesting — because there's a whole tradition of violin making in Kerala and Tamil Nadu that doesn't use European tonewoods at all. The Carnatic music tradition has its own violin culture, its own playing style, its own instrument aesthetic. And those instruments are traditionally made from teak or jackfruit wood.
Both are locally abundant. Both are dense enough, workable enough, suitable enough. And both have been producing good-sounding instruments for generations.
I chose teak. And the reason I chose teak over jackfruit is embarrassingly practical: teak is easier to work with. When you're already dealing with enough unknowns — and believe me, I was dealing with enough unknowns — you don't also want to fight the wood. You want a material that's cooperative. That forgives a slightly wrong angle. That doesn't split when you're carving across the grain.
Teak cooperates. So: teak.
Now — the glue.
I want to spend a moment on this because I think about it a lot. Even now, after everything is done.
Professional violin makers are very firm: you use hide glue. Nothing else. Hide glue is an animal-based adhesive — made from collagen, from bones and connective tissue — and it's been used in instrument making for centuries. It's not the strongest adhesive. That's actually not the point. The point is that hide glue is reversible. You apply a little heat and moisture and the joint releases cleanly. Which means that someday — twenty years from now, fifty years from now, a hundred years from now — a luthier can take this instrument apart, fix what needs fixing, and put it back together.
With modern adhesives like epoxy, you can't do that. Epoxy is stronger than the wood itself. Try to force a glue joint apart and the wood tears first.
So the reason luthiers insist on hide glue isn't about strength. It's about longevity. It's about building something that can be repaired. It's about thinking beyond your own ownership of the object.
I used Fevicol.
I know. I know. Let me explain.
I tested several options. Woodfill set too fast — which sounds like a good thing until you're trying to align two curved surfaces and the glue is already grabbing before you're ready. Araldite has moisture sensitivity issues. Fevicol — which is a standard PVA wood glue, widely available across India — gave me the right working time. Slow enough to position things correctly. Strong enough to hold.
It worked. Nothing fell apart. The violin is structurally solid.
But I'll tell you honestly: I regret it. Not because it failed — it didn't. But because somewhere along the way, my relationship with this project changed. Building it started as a technical challenge. Finishing it became something more personal. And standing on the other side of it, holding this instrument, I feel like it deserved hide glue. It deserved to be built the way a violin should be built. It deserved the possibility of someone opening it up in a hundred years and fixing it.
I'm going to build a second violin. And the second one gets hide glue. The second one gets done properly.
PART FOUR: BUILDING THE MOULD
"Before you make the thing, you make the thing that helps you make the thing"
The first thing I actually built for this project was not a violin.
It was a mould.
A mould is basically a rigid template — I cut mine from 12 millimetre plywood — in the shape of the violin body outline. It's a jig. A reference. A fixture around which you build the actual instrument.
And I want to talk about this for a moment because I think it's a principle that goes beyond violin-making. In almost every precision build — furniture, cabinetry, instrument making — you often spend significant time building the thing that helps you build the thing. The jig. The template. The fixture. And it can feel like wasted time because you're not working on the actual project yet.
It is not wasted time. The quality of your jig determines the quality of your final product. Full stop.
I printed the full-size template from makingtheviolin.com on A3 paper — the violin outline, the positions of the corner blocks, everything. Cut it out. Traced it onto the plywood. Cut carefully to the line with a jigsaw, cleaned up the curves with a file and sandpaper.
A full day's work for a piece of plywood with a curved outline.
Worth every minute.
Because every step after this — every piece I bent, every joint I glued, every plate I aligned — referenced this mould. If the mould was wrong, everything would be wrong. If the mould was right, I had a fighting chance.
Spend the time on the mould. That's my advice.
PART FIVE: BENDING THE RIBS
"In which I use a soldering iron for something it was not designed for"
Okay. Here's the part I know some of you have been waiting for.
The ribs — the thin curved wooden sides of the violin body — are 1.5 millimetres thick. That is one and a half millimetres. The thickness of a few sheets of paper. And they have to be bent into the complex compound curves of the violin's outline: the upper bout, the waist, the lower bout.
To bend them without cracking them, you use a tool called a bending iron. A bending iron is essentially a heated metal cylinder — you dampen the wood strip, hold it against the hot surface, and work it slowly into the shape you need. The heat and moisture together soften the lignin in the wood — that's the natural polymer that makes wood rigid — and it temporarily becomes pliable. When it cools and dries, it holds the new shape.
A purpose-built violin bending iron costs money. It's a specialized tool. And for a first build where I wasn't sure I was going to finish, I didn't want to invest in specialized equipment I might never use again.
So I used a soldering iron rod.
The barrel of a soldering iron gets hot. It has a roughly cylindrical surface. The physics are, in broad outline, the same. You're applying heat to damp wood. The wood softens. You bend it.
Is it as controllable as a proper bending iron? No. Absolutely not. A proper bending iron has consistent temperature distribution across a smooth, curved surface designed for exactly this purpose. A soldering iron has a pointy tip that gets very hot and a barrel that gets hot enough to do the job if you're patient and careful.
Patient and careful I can do.
And it worked. I bent every rib section to shape. Upper bouts. C-bouts — those elegant curves at the waist. Lower bouts. One by one, dampened, heated, coaxed into shape over the soldering iron barrel, held in position while they cooled.
I'm not going to pretend it was easy or that I wasn't anxious the whole time. At 1.5 millimetres, these wood strips are right at the edge of their tolerance for bending stress. Too much pressure too fast and they crack. Too little heat and they spring back. You have to find the dialogue with the material — push a little, let it respond, push a little more.
When all the ribs were bent and glued to the corner blocks and end blocks in the mould, I stepped back and looked at it. This rib cage. This recognizable hourglass shape of a violin's body, in wood.
That was the first moment where I thought: maybe I'm actually going to finish this.
PART SIX: THE LININGS
"The detail nobody talks about that matters more than you'd think"
Before I attach the plates, let me tell you about something called linings. Because they're one of those things that nobody really talks about in casual conversation about violin-making, and they are genuinely important.
Linings are thin strips of wood — I used thin softwood strips — glued along the inner top and bottom edges of the ribs.
They do two things. First, they stiffen the rib walls, which are so thin on their own that they have very little structural rigidity. Second — and this is the critical part — they dramatically increase the gluing surface when you attach the plates.
Think about it. The ribs are 1.5 millimetres thick. If you glued the plate directly to the edge of the ribs, you'd have 1.5 millimetres of contact surface. That's almost nothing. With linings added, that contact surface becomes wide enough for a real, reliable glue joint.
Small detail. Unglamorous work. The linings aren't visible in the finished instrument. Nobody is ever going to ask about your linings.
But skip them and your plates will eventually separate from the ribs. So.
Bend them in. Glue them in. Let them cure. Then move on.
PART SEVEN: CARVING THE PLATES
"The hardest thing I have ever done with a piece of wood"
I need to be honest with you about the plates.
Carving the plates — the top and back of the violin body — was the hardest part of this entire project. Not hard in the way that was frustrating or annoying. Hard in the way that made me question whether I was going to be able to finish. Hard in the way that sent me to bed some nights genuinely uncertain whether the thing in my workshop was going to become a violin or just an expensive pile of shaped wood.
Let me explain what you're doing.
You start with a flat, rectangular piece of teak. And you have to turn it into a three-dimensional arch — gently domed in both directions — with a thickness that varies carefully across the entire surface. The centre of the plate is thicker for structural strength. The edges are thinner. There's a graduated map of target thicknesses across the whole surface, and you're working toward those numbers by hand. With gouges. With knives. With a small plane.
No CNC machine. No template routing. Hand carving.
I started rough — used a gypsum cutter to bring the wood down to approximate shape. Then an angle grinder to remove larger amounts of material. Then I transitioned to hand tools as I got closer to final dimensions. And I checked. Constantly. With calipers.
You develop a kind of obsessive relationship with your calipers when you're carving plates. You check every few centimetres across the surface. You find a high spot, you take a few passes with a gouge, you check again. Take a few more passes. Check again.
It is tedious in a way that I found unexpectedly meditative once I stopped fighting it.
There's a technique that experienced luthiers use called tap toning. You tap the plate with your knuckle or a small mallet and listen to the pitch that resonates back. As you carve and the plate gets thinner, the pitch changes. Master luthiers can tune their plates to specific target frequencies — they're literally using acoustic feedback to guide their carving. The plate becomes its own measuring instrument.
I wasn't there yet. I was working from numbers. But I understand now why tap toning works, and I want to learn it properly on the next build.
Then the f-holes.
I want to say something about cutting the f-holes that I don't see mentioned enough in build tutorials: it is terrifying.
You've spent days carving this plate. It's starting to look like something. And now you have to take a knife and cut two precisely shaped openings through it. If you slip — if your blade wanders even a few millimetres from the line — you have a visible, permanent mistake on the front face of your instrument.
I traced the template very carefully. I scored the outline lightly first. I cut in stages, taking thin slices rather than trying to push through in one stroke. I held my breath more than once.
They came out well. Not perfect — a luthier would find flaws I can't quite see anymore because I've looked at them too long. But clean. Symmetrical enough. Looking like what they're supposed to look like.
And then the bass bar.
The bass bar is a long thin strip of spruce glued to the inside of the top plate, running roughly parallel to the bass-side strings. It distributes low-frequency vibration across the whole plate and provides some structural reinforcement against the downward pressure of the bridge.
Fitting it required shaping the bar so it sits in full contact along its entire length against the curved inner surface of the plate. Curved piece fitting curved surface. Multiple rounds of fitting, marking the high spots, shaving a little, fitting again.
When it finally sat right, I glued it in and clamped it. And I remember looking at this plate — f-holes cut, bass bar glued, surface rough-sanded — and thinking something had shifted. This wasn't a piece of carved wood anymore. It was starting to have a specific identity.
PART EIGHT: PUTTING IT TOGETHER
"The glue-up, the soundpost, and the moment it became a box"
Okay. At this point I had all the main structural components ready. The rib cage in the mould. The back plate carved. The top plate carved, f-holes cut, bass bar installed. The linings in place.
Time to put it together.
Back plate goes on first. Glued along the linings, clamped all the way around the perimeter — every few centimetres, clamp after clamp after clamp. And then you wait. You walk away. You don't poke at it. You let it cure overnight and you try not to think about it.
The next morning: remove the mould. And now I have this open half-box — back plate sealed on, rib cage exposed on top, linings visible inside. I can see the interior of the instrument. I can reach in.
This is when I fit the soundpost.
I want to spend a moment on the soundpost because I think it's one of the most remarkable small objects in the world of instrument making.
The soundpost is a tiny wooden cylinder — maybe 6 millimetres in diameter, cut to exactly the right length to fit snugly between the top and back plates when the instrument is fully assembled. It's not glued to anything. It stands vertically inside the instrument, held in place purely by friction and the downward pressure of the strings acting through the bridge.
Its job is to transfer vibrations between the top and back plates and to affect how the sound develops inside the instrument.
And its position is extraordinarily sensitive. Moving it as little as half a millimetre — forward, backward, toward the treble side, away — changes how the instrument sounds. Half a millimetre. Experienced luthiers spend real time adjusting soundpost position on finished instruments to tune the tone. It's one of the tools they have after the instrument is built.
To set it, you use a long thin tool called a soundpost setter — a metal rod with a notched end. You manoeuvre the soundpost through the f-hole and try to stand it in exactly the right position inside the instrument. Working blind through a narrow gap. Moving an unsecured piece of wood to a precise location you can't fully see.
It took me a while.
The soundpost fell over more than once. I retrieved it with the setter and tried again. My hands were steadier than I expected them to be. My breathing was not.
When it was finally standing in the right position, firmly wedged, not going anywhere — I held the half-open instrument up to the light and looked through the f-hole to verify placement.
Perfect. Or as close to perfect as I could judge.
Top plate goes on. Glued, clamped all around, overnight cure.
And the next morning — I removed the clamps.
And for the first time, I was holding a violin body.
I can't fully explain what that felt like. I've been trying to find the right words for months. The closest I can get is this: it felt like recognition. Like something that had been theoretical — that I had imagined, planned, measured, worried about — had suddenly become solid. Real. Undeniable.
I made a violin body. With my hands. From a piece of teak.
PART NINE: THE NECK AND THE SCROLL
"Carving the curly bit"
The neck of a violin is carved from a single piece of wood. And it includes — at the very top — the scroll.
The scroll. That famous decorative spiral. The curly bit.
The scroll has no acoustic function. Zero. It exists purely because violin makers in 17th century Italy were steeped in a visual culture where scrolls were everywhere — classical architecture, furniture, decorative arts. And somehow the scroll became part of the violin's visual identity, and four hundred years later here I am trying to carve one.
Carving a scroll requires you to work from a flat two-dimensional template and produce something that spirals in three-dimensional space. You're cutting away wood in three dimensions simultaneously — depth, width, height — and you have to hold the finished shape in your mind while you work.
My scroll is... acceptable. It's recognisably a scroll. It spirals in the right direction. Up close, an experienced eye would find things to criticize. But as part of the whole instrument, from any reasonable viewing distance, it looks like what it's supposed to look like.
I'm proud of it. Quietly, appropriately proud of it.
Below the scroll is the pegbox, where the four tuning pegs live. Four precisely placed holes drilled through the walls of the pegbox — the pegs are tapered, so they grip tighter the more you push them in while turning. Getting those holes positioned and angled correctly matters because misaligned pegs can bind or slip.
And then the neck gets attached to the body. This is called the neck set, and it's one of the most technically demanding joints in the build. You carve a mortise — a fitted recess — in the upper block of the violin, and the heel of the neck slots into it. The angle of this joint is critical.
Why? Because the neck angle determines the height of the strings above the fingerboard — called the action. Too high and the instrument is physically difficult to play. Too low and the strings buzz against the wood. The correct projection is 5 to 6 millimetres above the top plate at the position where the bridge will sit.
I measured. I test-fitted. I adjusted. I measured again.
When I was confident the angle was right, I glued it and clamped it. And I didn't touch it for 24 hours.
The fingerboard — the ebony strip that runs down the neck that players press strings against — I bought ready-made from a violin shop. Hand-planing an ebony fingerboard to exactly the right longitudinal radius is skilled work that I could have attempted. But it wasn't the most important thing to learn on this build, and a properly made fingerboard from a shop fits well and plays well.
Work smarter. Know which battles to fight.
PART TEN: VARNISHING
"Why a four-hundred-year-old mystery matters to a first-time builder"
Varnishing.
I want to talk about this honestly because I went down a rabbit hole on violin varnish that I did not expect to go down.
The practical purpose is simple: varnish protects the wood. It seals the pores against moisture. It gives the instrument its finished appearance. I sanded the whole outer surface progressively — working through grits until the surface was smooth and uniform — and applied three coats of varnish with 24 hours between each coat.
That's the practical story.
Here's the other story.
The varnish on a Stradivarius violin — one of those instruments made by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona, Italy in the late 1600s and early 1700s — has been analysed by scientists for decades. Spectroscopic analysis. X-ray diffraction. Chemical sampling. Entire scientific careers devoted to understanding what Stradivari used and why his instruments sound the way they do.
And they still haven't fully cracked it.
Some researchers found unusual mineral compounds in the wood beneath the varnish. Some luthiers believe the varnish itself — whatever specific resins and oils Stradivari used — slightly modified the surface of the wood in a way that improved its vibrational properties. Others think the varnish is secondary and the wood preparation is what matters. Others think it's all about the wood itself, specifically old-growth Alpine spruce from the Little Ice Age that doesn't exist anymore.
Nobody fully agrees.
What we do know is this: a thick, hard, modern film-forming varnish — heavy polyurethane, for instance — applied in thick coats will damp the vibration of the wood. You're essentially wrapping the instrument in a slightly stiff shell that restricts how it moves. Traditional oil or spirit varnishes applied in thin coats are less intrusive — they penetrate and protect without restricting movement as much.
On a first build, this matters less than you might think. My neck angle, my plate graduation, my soundpost position — these were the variables that determined whether my violin sounded like a violin. The varnish I used was not the limiting factor.
But now that I'm thinking about a second build — now that I've finished one and understand what the project actually requires — I'm going to research varnish properly. I'm going to understand the chemistry. I'm going to make a choice I'm confident in rather than just using whatever was available.
That's how building teaches you. Not just about the thing you're building. About the thing you'll build next.
PART ELEVEN: STRINGING UP
"The moment of truth — and the 90 pounds I was most afraid of"
Setup. The final stage.
I fitted the bridge. The bridge is that carved piece of maple — I had one cut by a local shop — that sits on the top plate and holds the strings up at playing height. It's not glued. It's held purely by the downward pressure of the strings through it.
Before you can use it, the feet of the bridge have to be fitted to the exact curvature of that specific instrument's top plate. No two violin tops are curved identically, so every bridge has to be custom-fitted to its instrument. I used carbon paper between the bridge feet and the top plate — press it down, slide it slightly, look at where the marks appear. Shave those spots down. Repeat until the contact is even across both feet.
Then grooves at the top of the bridge: four of them, one per string, at the right spacing and depth. Too deep and the string buzzes. Too shallow and it pops out.
Same thing at the nut up by the pegbox.
And then: strings.
G, D, A, E. Lowest to highest. I threaded each one through its slot in the tailpiece, laid it over the bridge and nut, and wound it onto its peg.
And here is the part that made me nervous.
The combined downward force of four violin strings at full tension is approximately 90 pounds. About 40 kilograms. Pressing through the bridge into the top plate, stressing the glue joints, loading the neck, pulling on the end button.
Ninety pounds of force on a box I built with wood I carved and glue I mixed and joints I cut.
I brought each string up to pitch slowly. Gradually. Checking the tuning app on my phone. G first, then D, then A, then E. Coming up a little on each string in turn rather than bringing one fully up to pitch before moving to the next — to load the structure gradually, evenly.
Nothing cracked. Nothing separated. Nothing moved.
The instrument sat there under full tension and it was fine. Solid. All those glue joints — Fevicol joints, not hide glue, but holding — holding.
I picked up the bow. I rosined it — rubbed the rosin block along the bow hair until the hairs had enough of the amber resin to grip the strings.
And I drew it across the G string.
It made a sound.
Not a beautiful sound. I'm not going to romanticize it — I'm a beginner player bowing a beginner instrument and the sound that came out was scratchy and uncertain and not what a violin sounds like in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
But it was a violin sound. Unmistakably. A sound that this object — that I made — was making in response to the bow.
I sat there for a while. Just playing open strings. G. D. A. E. Not chords. Not music. Just testing whether the thing was real.
It was real.
PART TWELVE: THE HARD HONEST PART
"What I got wrong, what I'd change, and why it matters"
I want to be honest with you now, because I think honesty is the most useful thing I can offer.
There were hard days in this build. Days when I looked at what I was making and genuinely wasn't sure it was going to work. Days when the plate looked all wrong, when the neck angle felt uncertain, when I'd spend an hour on something and then spend another hour undoing it.
My friends believed in me. Sanal and Aswin — the friends I started violin class with, the reason I held a violin in the first place — they were encouraging throughout. And I was grateful for that. But I want to be honest: other people's belief in you is wonderful and it's not enough. Not on its own. Not for something this hard.
What got me through was something I've been trying to articulate properly ever since.
I kept coming back to a thought that sounds almost too simple to be useful: the process is the point. Not the finished object. Not the views the project would get. Not what anyone else would think of it. The daily decisions. The problems solved. The things learned. The material slowly becoming itself under your hands.
I had to let go of the outcome to be able to do the work.
And that — I think — is the central lesson of ambitious making. The people who finish their projects aren't the people who never doubted. They're the people who found a reason to keep working that didn't depend on certainty about the outcome. Because certainty never comes. Not in the middle of a hard project. There is no moment where the doubt completely disappears and you know it's going to work out.
You just keep going.
What would I change?
Hide glue. Definitely hide glue.
I'd source better wood for the soundboard — try a spruce top and understand acoustically what difference it makes compared to teak. I want to run that experiment on my ears.
I'd take more measurements during the plate carving. More thorough. More systematic. Start learning tap toning.
I'd be less afraid of getting the neck angle slightly wrong and just commit earlier. I spent more time on the neck set than I needed to because I was afraid of making an irreversible mistake.
But I want to say something about regrets, because I've thought about this a lot.
Every regret I have about this build is a lesson. And every lesson is something I carry into the next one. The second violin — and I am going to build a second violin — will be better than the first because the first one taught me everything it had to teach me. Including what I did wrong.
You don't build a good thing on the first try. You build the thing that teaches you how to build a good thing.
PART THIRTEEN: WHY IT MATTERS
"The bigger thing I didn't know I was making"
I want to zoom out now. Because I've been thinking about a question that the violin-making project keeps bringing me back to.
Why did I do this?
Not "what were my reasons" in a practical sense. But why, at this level. Why does a person who works on solar panels and wind turbines — whose professional world is circuits and inverters and energy efficiency — why does that person spend months carving wood by hand?
I've thought about it a lot. And here's what I've come to.
There's a kind of knowledge that lives in your hands that doesn't live anywhere else.
You can read about how a violin works. You can watch videos. You can understand the acoustic physics — Helmholtz resonance, plate vibration modes, how the soundpost transfers energy between surfaces. You can hold all of that in your head.
And you will not know what it actually means until you've tried to build one.
Because the moment you hold a too-thick plate and hear the thud when you tap it, and then carve it thinner and hear the pitch rise, and understand in your body — not just your head — that what you're doing is acoustic engineering with a hand tool... that's when you actually understand it.
The hands know differently than the mind knows. And some of the most important understanding I have about this instrument came from my hands, not from any explanation.
There's also something about the continuity.
Violins have been made by hand for four hundred years. The knowledge of how to make them — how to bend ribs with heat, how to graduate plates, how to fit a soundpost — has passed from master to apprentice, generation to generation, across centuries. That knowledge now lives in books, in websites, in YouTube channels. And it passed through makingtheviolin.com to me. In Kerala. In 2024.
I am part of that chain now. Not as a master luthier. Not as an expert. But as someone who took that knowledge seriously and used it to make something.
And the violin I made — imperfect as it is, Fevicol joints and soldering-iron-bent ribs and a scroll that a luthier would critique — exists in the world now. A physical object that wasn't there before. That I made with my hands from raw material.
That matters to me. It matters to me in a way I didn't fully anticipate when I started. It matters in the quiet, settled, no-need-to-explain-it way that only real making produces.
Making something teaches you that everything is made by someone. Every object in your life — every chair, every building, every electronic device, every piece of clothing — someone made it. Someone solved the same kind of problems you solve when you make something by hand. Someone worked through uncertainty and kept going.
When you make something yourself, you join that conversation. Not loudly. Not with any grand claim. Just quietly, by adding one more made thing to the world.
OUTRO
"What I want for you"
If you're listening to this and you have a project in the back of your mind — something you've been thinking about making, building, trying — I want to say something to you directly.
Do it.
Not because it'll be easy. It won't. Not because you'll get it right the first time. You probably won't. Not because you have everything you need already. You probably don't.
Do it because the making is the point. Because the process will teach you things about the object, about the materials, about yourself that you cannot access any other way. Because the regrets you have about a finished imperfect thing are infinitely more useful than the regrets you have about a thing you never started.
The violin in my hands right now — scratchy when I play it, slightly imperfect in its measurements, Fevicol glue and all — is worth more to me than any instrument I could have bought. Not because it sounds better. It doesn't. But because I understand it completely. Every joint. Every curve. Every decision I made and every mistake I made.
I built it. It's mine in a way nothing else is quite mine.
And if I hadn't started — if I had listened to that voice that said who do you think you are — it would just be a thought I had once in a music class.
Start your thing. Whatever it is.
Put your hands on the material and begin.
Thank you for listening to all of this. Genuinely — thank you. Links to the full build article are in the show notes. The template resource I used — makingtheviolin.com — is also there. Go look at it. See if it calls to you.
And if you're building a violin — or if this made you think about building one — I want to hear about it. Reach out. Tell me where you are in the process. Tell me what's hard. Tell me when you get to the moment I described at the beginning — the quiet, surprised pride of holding something you made.
I'll be here.
Until next time — make something real.
SHOW NOTES
Key resources mentioned:
- makingtheviolin.com — full-size templates, step-by-step guide, materials lists
- Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert — on creative inspiration and the courage to make things
- Violin tuning app — search "violin tuner" on any app store; many excellent free options
Materials used in this build:
- Wood: Teak (locally sourced, Kerala)
- Glue: Fevicol PVA wood glue
- Varnish: Standard wood varnish, 3 coats
- Strings: Standard violin string set (G, D, A, E)
- Fingerboard: Ready-made, purchased from local violin shop
Improvised tools:
- Soldering iron rod — used as a bending iron for shaping ribs
- Gypsum cutter — used for rough shaping of plates
- Angle grinder — for removing larger amounts of material from plates
What I'd do differently (build 2.0):
- Use hide glue throughout
- Source spruce for the top plate, maple for the back
- Learn tap toning during plate graduation
- Research traditional oil/spirit varnish formulations
Key terms for new listeners:
- Luthier — a maker or repairer of stringed instruments
- Ribs — the thin curved wooden sides connecting the top and back plates
- Bass bar — internal spruce strip that distributes low-frequency vibration across the top plate
- Soundpost — the small internal wooden cylinder that transfers vibration between plates; not glued, held by string tension
- Tap toning — technique of listening to a plate's resonant pitch to guide carving depth
- Hide glue — traditional reversible animal-based adhesive; the luthier's standard
- Neck set — the angle at which the neck is attached to the body; determines playable string height
- Action — the height of the strings above the fingerboard; affects playability
- Setup — the final process of fitting bridge, cutting string grooves, fitting pegs, and stringing the instrument
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