WILL’S BOW Part 3. Fitting the Frog.

The cambering is now done although more adjustments and corrections will come later. Now the stick gets planed down to about one millimeter oversized and the frog is fit on the stick. The frog must be in exactly the same axis as the head.

The frog is fit on the stick with a small plane, the ‘fin fer’. This one was made by a late 19^th century Mirecourt toolmaker. In Mirecourt, a whole trade existed to make the specialized tools of the luthier and archetier. One of the first people I worked for in Paris was Roger Giraudon, an instrument dealer who was not from the luthier trade. A poet and musician, he kept an apartment in Paris, London and Tokyo, making the rounds to sell fine old bows and violins. Giraudon was a friend of André Chardon’s widow and he helped her sell the remaining materials from the Chardon shop. This included hundred-year-old pernambuco sticks. But Giraudon would only sell me three for every time I delivered restored bows to his apartment…to keep me coming.

This plane from André Chardon sat on a shelf in Giraudon’s apartment and each time I made a delivery I would ask to buy it. Finally he gave it to me. You can see a tiny ‘C’ stamped on the side. The pencil gives you the scale.