Neck Carving...

I was somewhat intimidated by the prospect of carving a new neck for the fiddle, but it has turned out to be less complicated than I thought.

All I've done is carefully follow instructions, and remove small amounts of wood at a time!

I started by making a pattern from a piece of paper and tracing that onto a block of straight-grained maple.

Next, I roughed out the shape with the bandsaw.

I then used a microplane to remove the extra wood outside the lines.

The next step was to start shaping the scroll.  That began by tracing the pattern onto the scroll area.  Then the bandsaw and a fine-bladed Japanese saw were used for roughing it out.

My brother let me use his carving tools to do the fine shaping.  It took a while, and I forgot to take pictures of the process...but here's a photo of the scroll today, when I was working on shaping the peg-box.

  The book Violin Making: a Historical and Practical Guide has been very thorough in explaining the process, and I would be lost without it!  I'm also using the old scroll as a visual aide...