Vos commentaires sont les bien venus !
Christophe

One of my favorite activities is making my own musical instruments.

This page is dedicated to the Irish wooden whistle.

Here is a work freely inspired by a viola from the famous “Charles IX” series from Andrea Amati. It can be seen in the Ashmolean Museum collection, in Oxford. This viola is dated 1574.

Here is a tool not so common, originally designed for instrument making, but that can also be used for any kind of precise woodworking.

This is a tool for thickness calibrating, with good accuracy. It is mostly used for setting up any kind of tools having a depth stop, like the drill press or the thickness punch.

Here is a simple way to make a little chisel that aim at carving a groove for purfling inlaying.

Highly figured woods like curly maple or some burled woods are very difficult to work.

My personal build of thumb planes.
Funny enough, thumb plane translates “rabeau noisette” in French, which means hazelnut plane.

For rough carving the top or back of a violin, or any other archtop instrument like the mandolin or jazz guitar, there are several possible methods. The fans of power tools may use a rooter to do so, but the true amateur of the “wood feeling” will by far prefer to use the gouge.

The purfling cutter or scriber is a tool that allows scoring or cutting the thin groove that will fit the purfling on a top or back of a violin, as well as on the edge of top, back and sides of string instruments like the guitar or the mandolin. The tool allows scribing this groove parallel to the edge of the top or back.

J’ai réalisé, pour mon fils, percussionniste en herbe, ce Cajòn :

A very simple trick, but also very usefull : a pocket calculator, intended to convert currencies, can be easilly tranformed to convert inches into millimeters and vice versa.

The thickness sander is one of the most usefull machine to the luthier. It is a drum sander, relatively powerfull, that allows to sand some thin pieces on the thickness, but on a large width.

The radius sanding block is an essential tool when you want to make an arched fingerboard on a string instrument.

I have made this practice set for scottish snare drums as a christmas gift for my son, who learns the snare drums at the Bagad of Perros Guirec :

We are often tempted by using our mechanic vise for working a piece of wood. It is besides the most common vise one can find in any shop.

Resawing in its thickness a plank, often of high value in case of luthiery, is never easy and the bandsaws are often capricious when you want to saw along the parallel fence.

Here is a special vise somewhat particular which is delighted by luthiers and carvers.

It is easy to find a well known commercial version of this kind of gauge which aim at measuring the heigth between strings and frets.
One measures at the first fret, the twelvth, etc … and the wished heigth is under the musician’s preference and the specs of the instrument.

Here is a project I realised upon the request of my daughter who wanted a case for her Uke.

If you have like me series of cheap clamps, even they have been usefull for even heavy duty works, they are not very suitable for delicate work like instrument making.

This mandolin is signed : “Fratelli Umberto, Napoli”.

Here is an F5 mandolin I have finished during the Summer 2012.
It is built under the original model of Lloyd Loar, in the early 1920s, for the Gibson company in the US.
This kind of build, introduced by the Great American luthier, somewhat reconciles the traditional guitar type luthiery with the one of the violin makers :