@BillyG (BillyG) Love the sacrificial pegbox idea. Looks like the beginning of a cigar box instrument My $13 reamer came with a sheath. 

Luthiers use reamers that can cost 10 times that but this cheapo was good enough to do the peg holes for a one-off job on mechanical pegs. Not sure how this guy would work on friction pegs.

@steveduf I don't see myself doing this too often but genuinely envy the skills and the use you and Mack put yours towards. After Fiddlershop installed a first set of Knillings on my Sima Traian, I was hooked. It makes the violin soooooo ridiculously easy to tune. Glad I gave it a try and even happier that I didn't make any major boo boos.

Note to anyone else with zilch experience who's going to do this. Look at the video ALL THE WAY THROUGH. I looked at it in full before deciding to go for the fix but then only watched the first couple of minutes of the G-string installation when I actually got started a week later. (The demonstrator does it in the order: G, E and then A & D together to keep the bridge and sound post in place.) I started with the E-string, forgot to wedge up the A string for reamer clearance, and promptly damaged it. New A-string on order, sigh.

Thanks, @mookje, there is some really beautiful inlay work on violins out there. This one qualifies as cute, at best, when you take a closer look. It's pretty rudimentary.

I, like most folks, like to have the backstory of their violin so here's what I've been able to figure out so far: The old man I bought it from said he'd brought it (and his father's more valuable Italian violin) with him when he fled Hungary, alone, when he was 15. I put that at about the time of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.

From what I've gleaned elsewhere on the web, this is probably a "Dutzenarbeit" violin from the first quarter of the 1900... Mittenwald, Vogtland (Markneukirchen) and not originally made in Hungary. After WWII, at least on the Czech side of the border, I don't think cutsie inlays were an item. If it's from around Mittenwald, I imagine farmers in hunkering down in the winter months pumping out these student violins to fill their time. Since the size of the neck (short and slim) doesn't match the 4/4 size body, I embellish by imagining that this particular violin was put together just before the farmers had to get back to their fields. They were in a hurry, took what they had lying around, and glued them together. Can't come up with another reason for the mismatch (which works for me, ergonomically except for the ultra high projection which Fiddlershop is correcting.)

There are some online accounts of how the farmers piled up horse drawn carts with white violins when the roads cleared in the spring and hauled them into town (Mittenwald in the story I read) to be varnished and inlayed by students (teenagers, not luthier apprentices.) That would account for the cutsie mother of pearl deco.

That's a lot of "ifs" in one story... other hypotheses welcomed