Hobby report: A printed violin

Daylight savings is doing a number on my sleep cycle and so I didn't have much left for other things this week.

Early this winter, our child's violin teacher had shown us a picture of him with his first violin while he was a little boy in China. The boxy looking instrument most definitely didn't look like a violin we were used to seeing, so when we asked about it the teacher said that it was actually something his father had constructed because violins were very difficult to get back then (I think this would have roughly been in the 1980s). Now, after many decades of practice he's a professional violinist at a major orchestra in the city.

Seeing that picture put the seed of the idea in my head of building a violin. Our home didn't have a full sized one around and I had wanted to follow along with the kid's lessons anyways. Sure, I could easily just buy an inexpensive one to mess around with, but it'd be many years until our kid would grow old enough to require a 4/4 violin, and by that time they would have deserved a proper quality instrument. Making one that I would feel no guilt in disposing of in a couple of years sounded ideal. And so I learned that there are various 3d-printed designs that I could try!

People who know me would probably have expected me to go all out and try to build a genuine violin out of wood using luthier tools. I admit I had considered it but it takes a LOT of specialized tools, including adorable (but expensive) little finger-sized planes! I wasn't quite up for the massive investment in tooling, cost of wood, and the time needed to do the woodworking. So I went with the more accessible 3d print method. Maybe one day once I set up a proper wood shop I'll give being a luthier a go to get a feeling of how difficult it is.