Chris David Lilley Luthier

Materials for the mold

As you will have seen from the photos I use plywood for the mold, it is important however that the ply is marine grade, thinks tend to get wet when a violin is made as the glue is traditional animal glue which is dissolved in water and warmed up, the last thing you want is all the hard work put in to your mold to be ruined as the ply delaminates which, if you use ordinary ply is a distinct possibility!

Materials for Blocks and Linings

The two traditional choices are Spruce and Willow, personally I use spruce as I prefer how it works, and I have enough offcuts of wood from tops etc that I have a ready supply of block sized pieces, but either is good!

Materials For templates

Thin Ply or Plastic both work well, and I have both! if you use clear plastic and scribe the center line, it is then very easy to line the template up with the centre line of your instrument.


The Mold	Corners and Ribs	Cutting the Back	The Top
The Back	The Neck

Using a template to mark the shapre of the corner blocks.

A template is used to mark the corner shape ready for carving, this is the same template which was used to mark the mold shape.

Guoge used to shape corner blocks

Corner blocks being carved and the gouge used to do the job, the beveled edge is on the inside, so it's more of a curved in chisel in some respects.

The ribs are approximately 1mm thick

The ribs come in rough sawn strips and are thicknessed to about 1mm (according to my thicknessing caliper this one is 1.2mm!) The strips come slightly too high.

Ribs are cut to approx. 30mm high

The ribs are then cut to approximately 30mm high with a knife.