Trade Secrets: Making a fingerboard template with aluminium

By Atilla Okan

Luthier and lecturer based in İzmir, Turkey

The fingerboard is a very important part of the violin, and any instrument can suffer from various problems without a well-constructed fingerboard. Although there are ready-made fingerboard-making templates available on the market, sold by several different companies, I have observed that working with those templates can be more time-consuming than using one’s own. As the companies prioritise product durability when they are producing their ready-made fingerboard templates, they prefer solid materials that are not very easy to work with. The material I recommend for making a fingerboard template is aluminium, which is easy to process and saves time by leaving marks on the fingerboard…