Joining Archtop Backs & Faces
Here are some tips For Joining Archetop or violin backs & faces… There are at least two streams of thought for this which I’ll cover – “dead flat” and “spring”.
With the dead flat method you basically take some very light passes over the jointer or with your hand plane – so light in fact that you take just the slightest amount off of the plate’s joint. You can then finish off with a DEAD flat sanding block around 2″ or 3″ wide and 16″ to 18″ long. You might want to laminate this – so that there’s less warpage – out of mahogany or hard maple. Anything which is dimensionally stable will do. Alternatively you could use a scrap piece of 1″ thick glass or granite.
After you’ve made your “block” you can then glue a strip of 100 grit to the flat side with contact cement, and being careful to keep it flat on the surface, dress the archtop joint until it’s free of tiny scallops and other planer marks.
NOTE: To do this properly on your jointer you need to line up both infeed and outfeed tables exactly with a good metal straight edge. If either one is tipped up or down, even a hair, they can’t plane straight. You might be able to get away with it a bit more for furniture projects and the like but even a slight alignment problem would show up on archtop plates.
The second method essentially asks you to do away with the above advice and actually create a gappy or “spring” joint. A lot of the old time woodworkers went to a lot of trouble to create this joint so that the two pieces would then be pulled together when clamped. The reasoning behind this is that you want a bit of pressure on the ends of the plates because the end grain is subject to quicker drying which tends to pull on the joint at the ends – in theory evening things out.
The way to go about making a joint such as this is to apply more downward pressure as you approach the middle of the plate and then ease off at the ends. That should leave you with a barely visible gap in the middle of a short piece, a somewhat more visible gap on a larger piece. You should still be able to push the joint together fairly easily with hand pressure though so there’s no light visible.
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