rehairing a violin bow. an indirect salute to luthiers.

I had just realized that indeed, a violinist can seldom be a luthier (violin maker) at the same time as I applied yesterday what my violin teacher taught me on rehairing my bow.As with everything I do, I immersed myself in the whole process of rehairing a violin bow because I thought it's downright unreasonable to pay 1500 pesos plus the horse hair price to rehair a bow.

It was a tedious process.

First, you have to go to a ranch and seek out the ranch manager to get permission (or just pay) to cut some hair off of an adult male horse and the reason being, is that female horse hair are always wet with urine which degrades the quality of the hair (degradation meaning having an uneven surface due to uric acid. not because they're just, well, discolored as yellow). I chose a white horse so it's smoother to staccato (I use black horse hair for cello since it grips the strings more). So after telling the nosy horse caretaker about what I'll do with the horse hair, he finally let me measure and cut some horse hair.

Second, you have to perm and dry the hair. The recipe of my perming mix is 2 tsp mane and tail shampoo (the ordinary one), 500mL of water and 1 tsp toothpaste. The shampoo is for making sure that the weak parts of the hair strands will flake off, the water is for diluting and the toothpaste is for making sure the solution will not be acidic (since toothpaste is basic). I removed the salt from the original recipe from my teacher since I don't like extra friction in violin bows. To dry, I just used my sister's hair dryer for the job.

Third, you have to select which strands are rough and should be thrown away. This is quite hard to do and beginners (like me) can never fully end up with a perfect bundle of horse hair. The selection can also be done by the violinist himself as he plucks out the crappy hair as he/she feels the unevenness in tone in the finished bow (I plucked 4 this morning).

Last, you install the hair on the bow. This I wasn't able to do properly. That's because the adhesives won't dissolve in water and so I can't unhinge the top block and the frog block of my bow. So I improvised. Along with some twisties and a carving knife, I was able to tie the bow hair in place.

Luthiers go through this whole process (and more complex ones like making a violin) on a daily basis and with an artistic approach to it (in comparison to my very crude way of installing the bow). They're not just "fiddle-makers". They're artists that demand the same respect as the violinists they provide for.

I now end up with the conclusion that rehairing bows is hard and that...

1500 pesos for rehairing at a luthier's is huge ripoff.