Ole Eichorn, on his
Critical Section blog, at
Cremona
revisited - the science of violin making points to a pdf
article from Caltech on the science and technology of the art of
violin making (
Cremona
Revisited - the Science of Violin Making).
It's not the varnish secret recipe, or 'stewing' the wood: Joseph
Nagyvary, a biochemistry professor at Texas A&M University,
suggests that
Stradivari and Guarneri stored their wood in
mineral-rich brackish water for years before beginning to dry it
out. This storage allowed minerals to seep in and fill the empty
space left as microbes digested hemicellulose in the wood. Nagyvary
even suggests that 18th-century treatises calling for dry storage
with no additional treatment may have been a deliberate deception
aimed at obscuring the practices of the masters. The acoustical
effect of embedded minerals is not yet well understood, but
Nagyvary' experiments suggest that microscopic mineral crystals may
modify resonant modes by stiffening wood in some directions and
adding flexibility in others.