 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. Hello, my name is Bob Gatz and I have a luthier shop in central Minnesota. We're going to re-hair a violin bow in my shop today. We're going to cut the amount of hair that I need for a violin bow. By this time I've re-haired so many bows that I just kind of have a feel for how many hairs to put in a violin bow. Now we're going to widen them out a little bit so they won't slip out of the knot. We're going to be tying and now we're going to put a little beeswax on the string so we can control it a little better. We're going to take apart the frog of the violin bow. I'm going to take out the old plug. You have turned over the ends of the hair. Now this is my particular method of re-haring bows. There are several methods and this is the one I learned years ago. Like I said about since 1979 I think that was the first thing I tried to do is re-hair my own violin bow. I need three hands to tie these knots or I use my mall to tie the knot. Once I went to the dentist and he was working on a chipped tooth and I said, you got to flatten that tooth a little bit because I needed to re-hair violin bows. He said, figure something else out, don't use your teeth. I said, there's no other way to do it. So he did. Now we're going to turn the rest of the hairs under. This string that I use for tying the violin bow hair is a very strong upholstery string or a linen thread or something like that that won't break when I tie a tight knot. Part of the reason I got into repairing instruments is that I have always enjoyed repairing anything rather than throwing it away. I've been in bands, played music in different orchestras and choruses since I was a kid and couldn't find anybody to re-hair my bow around here. There weren't music programs at the time. So the repairing of instruments has just been kind of an automatic interest because I do enjoy the challenge of each individual instrument. Every instrument, the problem that it has is unique and so I have to try to figure out how I'm going to repair it or if I need a special jig to repair this instrument or a special tool. And so I've accumulated drawers and tons full of jigs and tools and I really enjoy taking an instrument that I find in whatever condition it's in, going through it and doing everything that I think it needs to have done to it and make it play again. Now we've prepared the inside of the frog to receive the new hair. Got this little pocket cleaned out. Now I take a piece of wood. This happens to be willow that I recycled from an old piano, probably over a hundred-year-old piano. It's a piece of that greenish colored willow, dry, and that's what I use to make the plugs. Now I take this wide chisel that I bought years ago at a junk store for about $2. It's a Eric Antonberg from Eskilstuna, Sweden chisel and it was used to open paint cans and things like that. Well, I've reconditioned it and it is some of the best steel that I've ever found in a chisel. And that's what I use to re-hair the bowl. Some people use knives, some people use small chisels, but I have gotten used to this thing and so I can chop myself some piece of blank wood. Now I start roughing this in and what I'm trying to do is trying to match the shape, the angles, the angle of the pockets slants in on both sides and slants like this on both ends. So I'm going to try to reproduce that same and they're all different. Every bow is different. Now I take the underside of this plug and I carve out a little bit of wood on both sides. And this is going to make a space for the knot to go into and then I take a file and smooth this out and run and I round this edge here so that when I'm pushing it in, when I'm pushing it in with the hair it's going to just kind of, it's not going to be a sharp edge, it'll be a rounded edge there. Now we're going to heat up a mixture of violin, rosin and a little bit of beeswax to kind of a glue that isn't really a glue. It comes out of the, cleans up easier out of the pocket. So I put the plug in to the mixture because I think it's going to be absorbed into the wood fibers and make it less susceptible to humidity so that, like in this weather, in the winter time it's not going to dry out and pop out. And I also impregnate the end of the bow hair with the same substance. Substant put the hair in first, add the plug quickly before it dries. If everything's right, this should slide right down in there, which it did. We push a little firm pressure so that it, while the rosin and the beeswax is setting up, I'm going to take this chisel, this old dentist's tool, and I clean up anything that might have come out. And I made the plug wider than what it needed to be to fit in so now I can trim this plug off, cutting towards the hair. So if I slip, I'm going to be taking the hair out. So now we're going to clean up the pocket afterwards with the old dentist's chisel here, great steel in those things. And cutting towards the hair, you have to just stop before you get to it. Clean that out, clean it up, and that's what it's going to look like. And this keeps the hair from pulling out. Now, the other thing I do that some people do, some people don't, is I will take the end of the string that had the beeswax on it, and I tie a couple knots here just to keep this together. Now I put the frog back together, it's going to keep the hair from getting under the bow slide. Now this is a bow slide, this will slide in on top of the hair. Okay, and I put my initial here just for the heck of it, I put the date, so I'll do 7.16. So if I re-hair this bow again, I can tell the people when I re-haired it, or I can see if I re-haired it. Now we have the hair coming out of the feral, and we've got this space here, that we have to make a wedge out of the same material. We're going to take and we're going to fit that same distance there. Now we're taking, distribute the hair evenly across the feral. If you get too much hair on one side or the other, it'll pull more on one side than the other, which will warp the bow eventually over time. Now that's done, I was re-hairing a pretty expensive bow once for this friend of mine, the gold mounted bow. He was watching me re-hair it, nervous because it was his baby, and I started pounding like this and he let out a little scream and ran out the door. It turned out just fine. So now I score the spreader wedge with my knife, and I take and I cut down, cut that off, keep doing that, keep scoring it, getting close here, get down to a point where I can just bend that over, off it comes. Take a little bit of glue on there, wipe it off right away, and what that does is it is absorbed into the pores of the spreader wedge and keeps it from being affected by the humidity also. So now we're going to place the frog with the hair on the bow stick. I will put this all the way to the front, tighten it up. I have a certain amount of turns now when this starts adjusting. So now we're going to turn this around. Now we start going, we comb the hair, got a fine tooth comb. So now we're going to just get any snags or short hairs out of the hair. Just begin with here, and so now we're going to make the plug for this end. So now we've got the plug fit. It's slightly larger, I've got a space here to allow for the hair. I'm going to take that back out and carve out the underside of the plug again. Alright now I've got a cup of room temperature water. Now we're going to wet the hair slightly, bring it out. Now we're going to comb it out. So now this is the most vital point here. We're going to cut the hair at the right length for a humid summer day. That's that. Clamp this down again. I'm holding this between my thumb and finger. Very important to keep that flat. Now what I usually do here is I'll do the flame again to blunt the ends of the hair. So now this is another part that's by feel. What I'm trying to do here now is take this width and reduce it down to the smallest width that I can. So the way I do that is I'll pull and let up pressure on my left hand. Pull with the right hand straight and then I will push pinch the end here. And I let up with my left hand slightly just letting the hair slide over towards itself. Not too far so it crosses over but just slightly to the point to where I can feel the hair sliding together without crossing over. So now I've got a point that I can tie a knot around. Three times around. I go again. Tight. Okay. I reach in. That string out. Now here's where I need the flat spot on that tooth to tie this knot. Cut off the excess thread. Give it one more little. Those ends off. Okay. Now still I'm holding with this hand keeping the hair from going over itself. I pinch here. Pull and pinch. Turn this over like this. Holding it. Still. Flip this over. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to pregnate this plug with the beeswax. End of the hair. Insert the hair. The plug. Push down now with the pressure on the plug. That's that. We clean this up. I can take my big chisel and cut it off. Now we put the hair together. Put the frog. A little bit of beeswax and petroleum Vaseline that I mixed together to use as a lubricant down here on the bow screw. And then we tighten it up for the first time. And then we comb it out. Once in a while there's a hair that wasn't quite long enough to get in the knot. And we kind of line them up again here. There's one right there. Take that. Cut it off. And that's it. Bowsery hair. Let it dry and keep an eye on it so it doesn't get too tight while it's drying. Looks good. That's it. Hang it up and keep an eye on it so it doesn't get too tight while it's drying. But that'll dry out and be able to play the violin. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground, consider making a contribution at lptv.org.