Category: on the workbench

On my workbench today: half a bass with a note reading “Johann Stephan Thumhard.” The handwritten date is barely legible. A bit of UV light helps me make it out and reveals what might be a “16.” This suggests the bass was made a year before his death.
The Thumharts (Dumbhart) were a large family of violin makers who lived and worked in Bavaria (Amberg, Straubing, Ingolstadt, Munich) during the 18th and 19th centuries. Lütgendorff writes about Johann Stephan Thumhard:

Thumhardt, Joh. Stephan — Straubing. *1749, † 26. Dezember 1817
According to the Straubing trade register, he established himself there in 1769 as a violin and string maker, married in 1773, and handed over his workshop and estate to his son Alois in 1817. He may have been a pupil of Buchstädter, whose work he imitated quite closely. His better violins display a characteristic narrow model with elongated scrolls and sound quite good; however, his brown-yellow or brown varnish has mostly lost its luster. His gravestone still stands in the St. Peter’s Cemetery in Straubing, and on it one reads: “He was esteemed by his fellow citizens, and posterity will still praise him for his works of art. R. J. P.” The twelve violins he allegedly made for a wealthy connoisseur and eccentric are considered his finest. For the first, he received one ducat, which seemed too little to him, yet he said nothing when he was immediately commissioned to make a second, even better one. The customer then paid two ducats for it and demanded an even better one, for which he paid three ducats, and so on up to twelve ducats. Because of their number—twelve—these violins are called “Apostle Violins”; one of them (from 1793) is still owned today by District Court Judge F. Ebner in Straubing. In the same collection is a viola from 1782; a viola from 1809 is owned by musician Schmid in Straubing. The church choir at St. Jakob there also owns two violins from 1814 and 1815, as well as a particularly beautiful bass (1815) by Stephan Th. His violins have already fetched quite good prices, and his basses even higher ones.

Height-adjustable double bass bridges are now widely used, and several bass makers have also experimented with adjustable necks. The goal here is to be able to adjust the string action (i.e., the distance between the strings and the fingerboard) in order to adapt the bass to varying humidity levels or different strings and playing requirements.

A customer recently brought me an interesting bass that had been fitted with a height-adjustable fingerboard (sic!) by the previous owner several decades ago. To achieve this, the fingerboard was screwed to the neck via a hinge beneath the nut. Beneath the fingerboard’s overhang, the angle of the fingerboard could be adjusted using a toggle lever. A stainless steel T-bar stabilized the neck, which would certainly have warped without the firmly glued fingerboard. Today, one would use a carbon insert here, but that material wasn’t available in the 1950s.

The whole design was very well executed from a craftsmanship standpoint—yet the customer still wanted it removed. Where the toggle clamp had been mounted on the neck block, I replaced the missing part of the top wood. The T-bar was not only screwed in but also glued—and could not be removed that easily. Milling it out was, of course, out of the question with stainless steel, as was applying significant force—so it stayed in place.

However, the bass is not entirely without adjustment options now: the bridge was fitted with Franz Moser’s height adjuster screws, as well as with a height-adjustable saddle.

New arrival in the workshop: a double bass from the Vogtland region. Before the bass is playable again, it still needs a little work, but the substance is very good and pleasingly untouched. Even the original varnish is still in good condition and just needs a little touch-up.

It is not known which workshop built the bass – the bass has no label. However, the dealer who resold the bass at the time attached a small metal label to the back with two nails: “Wilhelm August Otto | musical instruments & strings | Markneukirchen in Saxony.”
Metal labels like this, which were subsequently attached by dealers, are rather unusual on stringed instruments, but they are more common on (german) guitars. But at least the label gives us concrete information about the history of this bass, which often remains somewhat vague for most Vogtland instruments of this period.

I discovered this remarkable soundpost in the bass of a music school:
It is actually a little too short. Instead of a new soundpost, however, the last workshop decided to add something extra. So this soundpost was given a maple cap.

This is rare and remarkable because the cost of a soundpost lies less in the material and more in the working time. The careful adjustment of a soundpost is very time-consuming. It is not really worth it to glue something onto an old soundpost and then adjust it again.