DERIVATION OF THE STRADIVARI CORNER BLOCK（推导弦乐器的角块）.pdfVIP

--Michael Darnton/VIOLIN MAKING/Corner Blocks-- [This is a copy of one section of the forthcoming book tentatively titled Violin Making, by Michael Darnton, , downloaded from . It is an incomplete preliminary version, © 2012 by Michael Darnton. All publication rights, in any media are reserved. You may download one copy for personal use. No commercial use, commercial printing, or posting, either in whole or of substantial parts, in other locations on the internet or in any other form will be tolerated.] DERIVATION OF THE STRADIVARI CORNER BLOCK Just where and how large a corner block should be isn’t really a problem we think of until we have to make a new mold working backwards from an existing violin. In the course o developing a system that would be easy to communicate to my workshop students I started more closely examining how Stradivari dealt with this problem. When I started, makers didn’t have much to go on, but now with Francois Denis’ excellent book on outline design and Stewart Pollens’ book about Stradivari forms, it’s possible to access full-size reproductions of 12 separate Stradivari forms, with 21 surviving corner block templates (out of the possible 48) available for those forms. In the past, I had noticed several things about the workshop realities of corner blocks. First, it’s easier if the block span only includes a single curve. That means that it shouldn’t reach so far north and south into the upper or lower bouts that the curve starts to change. This single-arc shape makes the block easier to shape, and the counterform used to clamp the rib to the block is a simple curve. In my first forms, I used this as my guide for where to place the boundaries of my blocks, but something was still not quite right--the place to end the block was not well-defined, especially when working from outlines of old instrument