Video Transcript

Hello. I'm Dalton Potter of the Potter Violin Company. Today, we're going to talk about varnishing violins. Now, we put the varnish on a violin in order to help protect the wood. Now, you can see that the wood on this instrument is completely bare. It has nothing from keeping the weather, the dirt or oils from getting in to it. So, over time this instrument would degrade just like the wood on your house or on your furniture needs to be protected. So, violins are made out of three different kinds of wood. The first one that you see that's the most obvious is the fingerboard and that's perfectly black. Well that wood is not something we put varnish on. So, we're just going to take that one off. The front of the violin is made out of spruce. That's like a type of pine. It's very soft and very resonant. And the back of the violin is made out of maple, which is a much harder wood. And that's where the treble vibrations get produced. But all of them need to be varnished. So, the first thing we have to do is put a coat of sealer on. Now, when we start out with a violin, it's bare wood like you've seen. And there's a number of different ways to seal an instrument. But typically what we do is we start out by painting the wood with either a glue or varnish. In this case, one of these was painted with high glue which is a type of a water soluble glue that we use for making instruments with. The other one was painted with shellac. Now, you'll notice that this has a slight color to it, because shellac comes in various colors. Often it's clear but sometimes it has a brown or orange ting to it. And the helps, that helps seal the grain of the wood so things can't get inside and make the violin dirty and allow it to degrade. After you've put a number of different coats on, the varnish gets to a much deeper color. This one over here to your right is the spruce and this one over her to the left is the maple. Now, you'll notice that they took the color slightly differently even thought they both started out as white wood. And that's where the skill comes in trying to match those different colors. So, here we have four pieces of wood and these two have already been sealed and they have several coats of varnish put on them. So, we're going to bring these ones closer to these. They started out as bare wood like that. This one had high glue put on it and this one had some spirit varnish, what we call shellac put on it. But I'm just going to use this brush. It's a very short stiff bristled brush to go in my varnish pot here. I don't make my own varnish. I have some experts that make it for me. This is an oil varnish. But basically this can lay right on, right on top of that sealed wood. And it goes on in a very very thin layer. We want to brush it in every direction so that we get it really even. And over time what will happen is that because it's an oil varnish, it doesn't dry right away. We actually expose it to either sunlight or UV radiation in a what we call a drying box, a UV light box. But the last, the last strokes of your brush you always want to go with the grain. So, that's that one. And you'll see how it's starting to catch up. I'm going to do a little bit more on this one here, might as well. And again it's just a short, short bristled brush. We go around in every direction that we can to make sure that we get the varnish worked in nice and evenly. It'll go on thick and it just gets spread around like a little skin. So, after we let those, the varnish on that be exposed to Ultraviolet light or sunlight, it'll dry in a period of about twelve to fourteen hours and that's basically how you varnish a violin.