About Charm City Fiddles

Hello, I'm Jack Ralston and this is how Charm City Fiddles has become my passion. 

It all started over 20 years ago with my daughter Daven. She had been taking violin lessons for several years and was becoming quite a good violinist. As a result, she had transitioned from her beginner violin to a more eloquent violin that had been loaned to us from a friend. Upon learning the value of the loaner violin, my wife and I became concerned about possible damage or loss of this expensive instrument. This particular instrument was of a Maggini pattern, so I went to the internet to see what I could find. I found a beautiful old Maggini violin on Ebay that was located in Wales, and won it for $850 .​

Upon receiving the violin, it was at least as beautiful as the pictures, much more attractive the loaned violin. We quickly took the violin to the local luthier to be set up, whereupon he pronounced the violin as having a sound post crack on the violins back, and that it would cost $1000 to repair - and he wouldn't guarantee that it would sound very good after that expense. He asked if we could get a refund. I was initially disconsolate; I was so enamored with the physical beauty of

the violin.​

At this point, some information about myself. I was educated and employed as an aerospace engineer; a natural evolution given that I was obsessed with building flying model airplanes in my youth. I had gone from simple balsa wood and tissue rubber powered models as a child to my own designs of complex gas powered, radio controlled aircraft as a teen. After college, I began to design and build wooden furniture for my own use and others. 

With this background in mind, the proclamation of the luthier was eventually viewed as a challenge - I was very familiar with working with wood, on complex large and small projects, and had the tools to do this work. I just needed information about these beautiful wooden boxes. Since this was still in the early days of the internet (YouTube was just a concept!), I fell back to the more traditional educational material - books, and lots of them!

I purchased a wide range of material spanning the history of the violin from its construction, restoration and preservation, from current authors to ancient texts. What I immediately learned was that the luthier was not exaggerating the significance of the soundpost crack on the back. While the majority of sound post cracks occur on the softer spruce front plate, which is significantly easier to patch, the maple back with its increased density, was a much bigger challenge. With an engineer's determination, I ordered the violin specific tools I needed and dug into the process.​

For the non-luthier readers, patching a sound post crack requires the removal of a thin layer of the wood in an oblong region covering the extent of the crack on the top or bottom plate. This step is followed by cutting out a matching oblong piece of the same wood and contouring its shape so it exactly conforms to the shape of the region of removed wood. Once this is accomplished, a support, or counterform, is molded to support the violin back so that the patch can be firmly pressed into the void on the back with the appropriate glue, effectively laminating the patch. Obviously, the application of this method requires the complete disassembly (and resulting reassembly) of the violin.

Needless to say, this process was a daunting introduction into violin construction and repair. It was ultimately a humbling process that put me in further awe the people that do this

as a vocation.

Having eventually successfully completed the operation, however, I can attest to the sense of accomplishment and the joy that comes from seeing and hearing an instrument that you built/restored sing with a new and beautiful voice. In my case, the repaired Welsh violin sounded better than the one that it replaced!

I was hooked.