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Regulars
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picked up what I believe is a late 1800’s Stainer. Nice looking old violin with a fairly sound body except for the twisted fingerboard. If you look at the pics you can see where the neck has been worked so that the fingerboard rolls counterclockwise
if you’re looking from the tail. I am obviously going to fix this unless someone can tell me otherwise. This violin also has the pegs that have the larger degree of taper and a smaller diameter endpin. Also...?does anyone know of a resource that shows how to date and evaluate the variations of Stainers?
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Steveduf,
Cool old fiddle, those gut strings appear to be very old, several decades, and the bailing wire tail gut string is the first I've seen done that way.
Mark
Master the Frog and you have mastered the bow.
Albert Sammons
Regulars
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Initial strip down of parts and clean
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@steveduf and others, but mostly Steve. I seem to recall that older violins often had a different taper for the end peg than the tuning pegs.
Success is the progressive realisation of a worthy ideal. —Earl Nightingale.
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@Irv
I read more than once that there are basically two different degrees of taper in pegs , this is obviously the case here... so do I ream to the more normal one? Or maintain the existing? 
Regulars
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Close call on end peg if the original is serviceable. If Mack is going to use it as a player, I would ream new pegs to modern taper for ease of tuning.
Success is the progressive realisation of a worthy ideal. —Earl Nightingale.
Regulars
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Mighty nice first round of clean up on that potential Stainer, @steveduf !
Concerning the endpin, from my amateur users point of view, we hardly ever interact with that bit of the instrument. Hence, I'd go with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Now, what constitutes "broke"? If parts and tools aren't readily available for one of the tapers, that could be a reason to standardize.
As for the pegs, users interact with them all the time so that adds a level of consideration. I don't think anyone will ever catch me owning a violin or cello without geared pegs now that I've experienced their tuning ease. Hence, I would ream 1:30 to make it easier to fit geared pegs either down the road or off the bat. That's MHO realizing that there are big debates about whether geared pegs are sacrilegeous or not. But, hey, I'm fiddling with my tuning pegs all the time and so their historical authenticity takes a back seat.
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That is a neat violin. We saw one at the pawn shop that looked like it had an interesting life. Actually, it has been there over a year and not touched by their luthier to repair. We were that close “ll” to getting it. It needs a lot of work and we are not equipped to do that and not sure if it would be worth it. I just look at it and imagine what its life was like and where it traveled. The F holes look like they were damaged and repaired from the top side amateurishly. We were put off by that. Figured no matter what we did, the sound would be off? I keep wanting to go back and ask what they wanted for it. We bought the cello and viola to rescue and donate. That was all we could do at that time.
Your violin above is in better shape, at least from the photos, than the one we saw at the pawn shop. I live that you do this.
The Bumblebee Flies!
Please ignore any typos. My typing ability on a real typewriter did not transfer to these device key pads.
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