About the Ribs of the Violin & How They're Made

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m David Kaynor for expertvillage.com. Violin ribs, ribs are sort of the trade name for the sides of the violin. The violin’s classic shape involves bending these ribs so that they’ll fit in this shape. The rib is maple but it’s incredibly thin, it’s about I think it’s about a 16th of an inch, maybe a little bit thicker; it’s almost kind of like a thick veneer. And the ribs are, they begin as basically straight pieces of thin maple, and then they’re bent using heat into these shapes. They’re actually moulds that violin makers can use to guide the shaping of the rib, and so there’s the treble, or there’s the upper rib, then there’s the c-bout as it were, then there’s the lower rib and then the linings which are I think often poplar, or some other fairly soft and flexible hardwood, are glued to the ribs, and they create a somewhat larger glue surface with which the back and top will glue to the ribs. So there’s a lining between the, there’s a lining for the joint of the back and the rib and a lining for them to joint of the top and the rib. Then at the corners, blocks—on better violins blocks are curved to fit in here, and they add structural strength and glue surfaces for the ribs to glue to and for the top and back to glue to. Cheaper violins don’t have corner blocks—the ribs are merely glued to each other and then the top and back glued on to them—and it’s just hoped that the whole thing will hold together as a unit. I think it’s generally believed that the ribs add a great deal of strength because it means that the rib can glue to a properly curved block as well as to the other rib, and the back and top can glue to the block which has more of a triangular area rather than merely gluing to the very thin area of the parts of the ribs coming together at the corner."