Addie

Here I’ve offset the latest, so you can see the pattern lines.

 Offset-drawing.jpg   40.81K   41 downloads

It’s amazingly hard to draw these.  I started with the Betts, because the LoC photos included measurements.  During revisions of the drawing of the pattern, I realized there were some Betts features still, so I eliminated those in the revisions.  So the latest drawing is all pattern, and that finger board issue is from the pattern.  

As I mentioned already, the pattern doesn’t seem to have seen a lot of use, but the volute and upper line of the peg box match the TV viola pattern, and comes close to some of the actual Strad scrolls.

I’m pretty sure the head is Saxon/Bohemian.   Looking at the purfling gave me indigestion.

Nice wood, clunky corners.

Not sure how Stradivari’s pattern got planed down...   

But you raise an interesting point about planing the finger board surface.  I had been wondering about the changes neck grafts made on the peg box/finger board angle relationship, but your point makes more sense, as far as post-Strad changes in the neck and head angle.

One thing I noticed in my comparisons, and I’m not sure if it’s Stradivari, Hill et al, or the photography, but the location of the nut is all over the place!

P.S. David’s (René’s) point is most obvious in the Henry Ford Museum’s 1703 Strad:

  I think my point is, Strad couldn’t color outside his own lines, by definition.  

But I think that  the pattern shows his ideal as far as the volute, but the throat, especially, is not like any of the actual throats.  The rest of the peg box matches some violins, but not others.  So, I personally think this was a pattern that was not his final or ideal, but part of the evolution of his design process.

One aspect of the pattern, the “finger board line,” seemed wrong at first, but does in fact match a few violins.

I would like to compare the pattern to some N. Amati scrolls at some point as well.

I’ll leave the medical side alone, since I’m not a doctor...  

on the practical side, learning to rest and relax the hands works, but it’s harder than you think!  We’re always grasping, pinching, twitching unconsciously.

Wrists straight, palms down, fingers spread but relaxed.

I do find this helps.