Re: playing outdoors

Pauline,

I agree that the geographic location of your part of the country has
wide variances of humidity and temperature that may combine to possibly
have detrimental effects on long-term storage without some climate
control.

A wonderful and quaint philosophy that a luthier I apprenticed with had
about wooden instruments is that, as he says, 'they are a thing of
beauty that are created with passion and have a soul to sing. If they
are denied that opportunity to sing for too long, they die of a broken
heart. It is our job [as restorers] to mend the broken heart, to
rekindle the spirit, and to return them to loving hands again.'

> You said that your miraculous violin was buried in a pile of lumber and that
> this might have helped save it.  How would that have worked?  One possible
> consequence of storage under a lumber pile is termites.  Old violins have
> been found with dead insects or worms inside, but the violins were still
> intact.

This 'wood pile' theory of mine is based only wild speculation, and
likely not much science:

First, termites fortunately don't exist in our latitudes (at least I
have never heard of them). But hey, I'm no entomologist, so don't quote
me on this. :) 

That's not to say that the dreaded 'eBay termites' don't appear from
time to time. In that I refer to someone purchasing a wooden item from
a termite-prone region of the world and have it shipped to a
non-termite-prone region of the world. 

I have heard stories of of people in non-termite-prone areas opening
something like a wood box after such an item had been stored for some
time in their home and discovered fine sawdust. What had likely
happened was the item may have been shipped when the termites (or some
other wood-boring insect) were in larval stage and had continued to
mature after arrival during storage. 

The mere speculation about the violin's good condition after being
buried in a pile of wood planks for years I surmise may have had to do
with the accumulative density of the strata of planks that separated
the case from the room air supply. 

I'm sure this layer did not necessarily prevent the violin from
experiencing the extremes of temp/humidity, but the R-facor of 
the wood above it may have made the extremes take place more gradually
at the depth of the case within the pile. Only one small end of the
case would have had any actual direct access to air circulation down a
long void in the pile's end.

Also, it would seems the wood planks would likely absorb and release
moisture and heat as the environment changed. Whether that factored in
or not, to slow these transitions, is anyone's guess.

One thing that may have helped was the case itself. It was in a
'fiberboard' cheap violin case common to the 1940s-50s which is 
flat on top and bottom, unlike the 'domed' cases. If the case had been
domed, I fear it most likely would have collapsed under the weight and
damaged the violin inside.

The weight of the wood piled on top of the case may have also acted in
sealing the contact between case lid and the case itself, further
reducing air circulation into the case.

I was unclear about the logic behind this gentleman's unique storage
scheme. It may have been that he felt that thieves would 
not think of looking in a pile of planks for a violin. It may have also
been a case of "oh, I'll just put it over there out of the way" 
and then the gradual process of accumulating stuff on top of it took
place over time. I think that's how most of us men's minds work. ;)

-Turloch