Amateur Bard

In my previous post, I showed the 'fit' of the pegs in the VSO. 'Fit' because it's truly atrocious, there's very little contact between the small end and the peg hole. When I pulled the peg out of the violin, I was struck by how wide the shaft of the peg seemed at the end. The end of the peg is flat and shows sign of machining. I didn't know off the top of my head what peg dimensions should be, and I wondered if the factory had simply bought an industrial amount of peg blanks and jammed them in because, hey, a peg is a peg, right?

I've been pondering if there was any simple way to make the pegs work. I don't want to invest in a peg shaver and reamer, I don't want to take this to a luthier to fix when I could spend that money on my other instruments, I don't want to spend $80 on mechanical pegs that I may or may not get to fit without a reamer.

In the dark recesses of my haunted musical mansion, I have an electric violin that I mostly ignore. It was fun enough to play with during high school but I don't really want to be a rock violinist, so it mostly just languishes in its case. Last time I felt pity and checked on it, I snapped the E string. (A truly ancient Red Label. I shed no tear.) Although I do have an equally ancient set of back up Red Labels, I just left the peg bare.

I had a flash of genius(?) today to put the peg from the electric violin into the VSO to see if there had been any degree of fitting work on the peg holes.

I popped the peg into the G hole and... completely forgot to look at the fit of the pegs because I was baffled that the VSO's pegs and the electric violin's peg were all sticking out roughly the same amount. If these were peg blanks too large to fit all the way through the holes, shouldn't they be longer?

*sigh* Not a peg blank, but a badly cut peg. It's not so much the lack of taper that makes it impossible to tune this peg, but rather the lack of tip. No amount of shaping or reaming would solve this. (I suppose one could ream some utterly massive holes, but then you run the risk of the peghead being ridiculously close to the pegbox, and you'd have to redrill the string holes. In essence: not going to work.)

Tomorrow, I'm going to consider the fit of the electric violin peg into the VSO and see if I could use them to temporarily string up the VSO.

There's been some fun deliveries at Chez Amateur Bard. I bought a beginner level violin (Franz Hoffmann Prelude) from Shar for my sister's birthday present (with her knowledge and permission; surprise instruments are Not Recommended lol). It's pictured on the left in the above picture. On the right is... a VSO. Yep.

Back when I was pet sitting, one of my clients would give me mazon gift cards as a bonus. I stopped buying from them because I Am Deeply Opinionated, so I never used the last one. I found it while doing a deep clean and decided to be a little selfish and frivolous. I ended up having to pay tax out of my own pocket, but I can live with that. I've been so looking forward to seeing what $50 of violin looks like. (Theoretically, this one was listed at $60 but on sale or 'on sale' for $50. I do most of my VSO window shopping on the Bay of E, so I've got no idea if it's a legit sale or one of those obnoxious tricks to make you think you're getting a good deal.) I was also curious because this didn't use the same stock photo that I see all over the Bay of E (maybe some day I'll put up my collection of screenshots of shame)

It's pretty interesting because at first blush, these two instruments look to be similar grades--but on closer inspection the VSO really lives up to, or down to, its status as 'yeah maybe a nice wallhanger.' And I can tell you one thing for sure: The Prelude sounds waaaay better than the VSO--if for no other reason than the pegs on the VSO are totally untunable.

I want to do a full comparison between these two, and I'll probably throw Opus into the lineup for a chuckle. (It's not that Opus is such a high quality instrument, but rather Opus is the low end of the 'student' violin class and even that is a jump up in terms of just material and labor quality.)

Enjoy this amusing preview of the hot mess that is my sparkly new VSO:

Amazing quality shoulder rest, Kun who???