Repairing a Finger Board on a Violin

Well, my poor violin has certainly seen better days. This was given to me by my Uncle Bill, who used to play for the Chicago Symphony in probably, he gave it to me in about 1972 or so. So it's been around the block a couple times. And recently I came to find out it had come apart. And because of its heritage, I wanna make sure I put it back together the right way. Part of that is using the right glue. It's very traditional to use hide glue on instruments. So that's what I wanna use here. So specifically what I'm gonna start with first is to get the fingerboard glued back onto the neck of this little violin. So to get started with that, I'm gonna start by cleaning the old glue off of this. Just like anytime we're putting two surfaces together, we wanna make sure we have a nice clean surface to join, so we get a good bond. So I'm going to start by getting the old glue off and then we'll be ready to get the new glue on. I've got the components cleaned up, the top of the neck, the bottom of the fingerboard. Just like always when I'm joining parts together, I wanna make sure that the joint itself is sound. It shouldn't be about forcing it to go together. It should just go together. Now the deal with hide glue is that one of the reasons luthiers, instrument makers, like it is that it's reversible. So it's something that if we needed to do a repair or if this was a highfalutin violin that a highfalutin violin player, not me, was gonna work with, somebody could loosen up the hide glue, change the way the instrument is put together so that it works better for that particular player. So again, I want to stick with what's traditionally used on instruments so that when this old violin is fixed it's put back together the same way it was originally made. I've got a little line on here that indicates where the nut of the fingerboard was. So I'm setting to the line on the head end. A little bit of squeeze out, which is nice to see 'cause it indicates that got just the right amount of glue in there, just a little bit easing out the side. So I'm going to let that cure out. Clean up my squeeze out. And that fingerboard is gonna fastened back onto the neck. And my violin is pretty close to being playable again.