Transcript from the video

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The pegs are made of different kinds of wood. There's rosewood which has a natural oil in it and then you have ebony which is beautiful and I like it it's quite elegant and then you have boxwood. Boxwood is also lovely wood and it's generally a bit softer and it's used mainly on older instruments.

 

Okay, now that we've decided on what wood we are going to use the next job is to actually pair down the woods. This is a little bit like a pencil sharpener. There are many kinds. This is a bought one and then a friend of mine, Patrick, he made me some others like this which is a block of wood with a blade and they work really well because they have more of a scraping action than a cutting action and you get a beautiful smooth finish. There's a little collar on the peg and we don't want when we're turning the sharpener for it to chip away. So we come with the knife and we go down and then we trim. Just very lightly we make a cut.

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You rotate the peg at the same time as you push down right next to the collar.

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Okay, once that is done we can begin turning down the peg. So we put them in the shaver. You can see the action of just turning the peg and it cuts beautifully smoothly. Another thing to aid it we can actually take some dry soap. This is a dry very natural soap without any scents or anything in it and we just rub a little bit of it onto the peg and then we put it in and that just makes it flow a little bit smoother.

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If you go to the peg and you go to the widest point just by the collar, once you have turned it down you should have a reading of around eight millimeters.(...) Right, now that the pegs are shaved down to the right diameter the next job is to work with the reamer.

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Now the reamer is a tapered reamer. It goes from thick to slightly thinner and the way we do it is we put it in the hole and we turn it. It would be very careful that you don't put it in the wrong hole which happened to me many years ago when I was really tired which would be for the E string.

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You put it in and then you very gently turn it like so. We can continue and we put it in to see how far we're going.

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A really good idea, take some dry soap and rub it on the reamer. This helps it flow a little bit smoother. Now we cut and once again we go very gently just turn it slowly and gently because it can cut really really fast.Then we put the peg back and then we see how far we've got to go. We can see it's still quite a way to go. Put a bit more soap and we shall continue. Right, we keep going slowly a little bit at a time and as we start to get closer what we actually do is we take a vernier caliper here.

 

You can measure this way with the vernier caliper but you can also measure outwards. We're going to use these two outer points and then we're going to come like this and then we're going to go and we're going to gradually measure and we want the distance to be between 11 and 13 millimeters. I'm going to sort of aim for 12. If they stick out they can look a little bit strange if they stick out too far and obviously we have to allow for wear so we don't want them too close in either.

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Okay, we're getting close now.

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Once we started getting close now we do something different. We're going to turn the reamer the other way so it compresses the fibers as emulating what would happen when you put the peg in.

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We're going to go and we're going to put it and instead of turning it this way we're going to turn it the other way but push it the same time and surprisingly it still cuts but it's not as fast and it kind of compresses the wood so you're going to go cut like this.

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And then we put the peg back. Now we're getting really close and we all do the reading and we get a reading. We've still got a few millimeters to go.

Let's take this out.

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Once you have the peg box wall touching flush then you gradually slide it. So there it's closed and then you gradually slide it up till it touches the collar and then you have a look at your reading and that is almost 12.

 

So I'll put it back and I will take a touch more off going backwards yet again.

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Just a very little bit off. That'll do it I think. I'll put the peg back.

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And now I'll just turn it around and then you've got the pencil and there you're going to go and you're going to mark with the pencil.

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You're actually going to mark the length of the peg.

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So the first thing we need to do now is prepare a block of wood a way of holding the peg so we can actually saw off the end. So what we do we find a block of wood and we drill a six millimeter hole. We take our reamer we put our reamer in and then we turn it till the peg can stick out a little bit so we can hold it. So there's the peg. We need to go a little bit more.

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Just keep going.

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That's perfect. Now you can see the peg sticks out just a little bit just enough for us to get the saw in. So here I have my portable vise which I which I've showed you many times. It's a wonderful thing so you can actually put this on a dining room table or even on a kitchen counter instead of having to mount a really big vise. This is sufficient for making a violin.

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So there we are we clamp it in. We've got our hole. Let's just see which way it goes.

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That way. Okay so we're going to put it in the vise.

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Okay and I'm looking for the pencil. There's the pencil line. So what you do you put your this is a razor saw very fine teeth that we used for cutting the ribs earlier on. We're going to put it on the line just on the outside of the line. Now we're going to gently cut but at the same time as we're cutting we're actually going to turn the peg. That's a good way of getting it to saw straight.

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To length. So now what we do we put it in just to make sure that we got it to a good length. Here we are it's now sticking out just a little bit. It's about a millimeter longer than it should be.

 

Next job is to get a file.

 

Okay I have these two files of which I stuck on some metal that's called a metal sandpaper and it cuts beautifully well. You don't have to worry too much about which way to cut because it kind of cuts in all directions.  So we'll start with the rougher one first and then I'll take the metal file. We hold it vertical straight parallel to the surface and we angle it very slightly about five degrees and then we push and it's the motion of rounding and rounding.  We continue to turn the peg.

 

So we put the peg back in and then we see how far we're sticking out. We always start longer and we gradually work our way down to the final thing. At the moment it's sticking out about a millimeter above the the plane of the surface so we'll do a little bit more filing. I'm going to take the finer metal sandpaper stick. Same motion we're going to go around and keep going.

 

Okay and we'll put the peg back in and we'll have a look.

 

There we are. You can see we can if you look carefully you can almost see the inside wall of the peg box here and over here it is sticking out very slightly. We want it that the whole thing is actually flush and then the dome will be just above the surface over here. So we'll just do a little bit more.

 

Okay I think that should do it. Let's have a look. Put it back in.  There we go.

 

Nice and flush. You can see the surface it's slightly doming it out. What we'll do is we will take some this is 220 sandpaper and we're going to take the peg and we're going to go and we're going to do we're going to rub it on the sandpaper and this is the motion. I'm exaggerating. We're turning it at the same time but not as much. We're going to turn the pegs. That keeps it even.

 

We don't take too much from one side and we're going to do some more.

 

Now you'll see it will have a nice smooth finish. Very slightly domed.

 

Now we're going to shift into the 400 sandpaper.

 

Turn the peg some more and now we have a really nice smooth finish. Yeah and the next job is to take some 400 sandpaper. Fold it like this.

 

So it is fairly stiff.  Then we're going to put a slight bend in it and we are going to rub the peg with the sandpaper.

 

Not much just very lightly just to give it a final finish.

 

Okay now that is done.  We are going to take some old wood. This is a special paste that is made for finishing ebony.

 

We're going to put a little bit on the peg. Not too much just a little bit.

 

The next job is to take some very fine steel wool and to start we just spread the paste before we rub too hard and we get some on the end as well. Then we start to give quite a lot of pressure and we rub it really hard to get a sheen.

 

So and you'll see the peg now starts to match the thing as though it hasn't been shaved out. Looks really good. Next job is to finish the end. The way we do that is we take some micromesh.

 

We take another little bit of the old wood paste and we put it on the micromesh.

 

And then we start to rub.  Rub the paste into the micromesh.

 

We might want to wipe some off if we put too much with the paper towel.

 

There we go and then we burnish it and that gives a really nice smooth finish.

 

And then the final polishing is we take some paper towel and we fold it like four times.(...) And then we give a really nice big solid rub.

 

You can hear the sound that's really polishing it up.

 

And there we'll have it. A nice smooth shiny semi satin finish at the end of the peg.

 

And then we're going to measure with our eye. We visually look and we're going to go about four millimeters from the people's wall.  Like so. Let me see if I can show you there. And then we're going to make a little mark a point and that's where we will draw the hole.

 

We're now going to draw the hole for the strings into the peg. It's crucial when we're doing it that we get the angle right. And then we vertically we look over to make sure we're going through the middle. And then we line from the side to see that we're going straight.  And then we basically draw.

 

When we start to get close to the end we go a little bit slower so we don't chip the wood.

 

Once we've drilled the hole what we need to know is to soften the edges so the strings don't break.

 

So what you can use you can use this as a countersink. So what we do we lightly go in and we just turn it just to soften those edges. Or alternatively we can take a file, a round file, that's got a reasonable thickness of about one and a half to two millimeters. And then we can file like this.

 

And then we can do it on both sides. And then what you do you come with the point of the file and then you put it in the hole and then you lightly just soften that edge just to break it up a little bit.  Okay now that we finished the pegs we are going to fit them to the instruments and we are going to use some different paste and some soap so that they turn smoothly.

 

So first thing I do is I take some soap and I rub some soap on the peg.

 

And then I put it into the hole, turn it. And then I go and I use some Hills peg paste. Same thing again putting on the places where it's going to go in. Put it on each side, put it in, turn it back to the soap. Soap it over there, pop it there.  And then we go and we put it in the instruments. Like so and we turn it.  Okay then we put it on.

 

Next job is we take the paste, similar thing.  Paste over there, paste over there.

 

Right so we're going to do that five times, approximately five times. And then what we're going to do we're going to get a drop of three and one on the side. And we're going to get a drop of three and one oil.

 

And we're going to take the lid off and we're just going to put a little drop here on the corner.

 

Okay and then we're going to take the peg and we're going to just lightly touch the peg with the oil.

 

Don't want too much, you just want a little bit of oil.(...) Okay you want it to be able to turn really smoothly so you can feel there's a little bit of resistance but it actually works really nicely.

 

Okay once we've done that we're going to take a little bit of this paper towel now. I'm going to fold it and then we're going to clean away the paste from the outside of the peg.

 

Okay and from the other side too. And there we have it. We're going to do the other three pegs and then the exciting part comes next where we begin to fit the sound post.

 

And yeah and then we work on the bridge and soon we will be hearing the violin for the first time. Which I can't wait, it's always something I look so forward to.