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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;smallaxe, post: 4394676, member: 13430&quot;]This is one of the things to look for when deciding if a violin was actually made in the 1600&#039;s. Violins that old were made in the baroque style and had shorter necks then modern violins. When the modern style of violin became popular around 1800 most good old violins were modified to the modern style. One of the changes involved cutting off the peg box, putting a longer neck on the violin, and then grafting the old peg box onto the new neck. If there is no graft, a violin was almost surely made after 1800. The craftsmen who made these modifications could be quite good, making the graft nearly invisible. But on close inspection, you should see it, and there should be some difference in the wood grain on each side of the graft. While the absence of a graft on a non-baroque violin means it&#039;s a modern violin, the opposite is not true. Signs of a graft does not guarantee it is a pre-1800 violin. Graft lines (but not actual grafts) were put on violins to make them look old. And a modern violin could have an actual graft as a repair, or a higher effort attempt to make a violin appear older than it is. This site goes into more detail, and has some photos.</p><p><a href="http://www.masterhandviolin.com/Blog17.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.masterhandviolin.com/Blog17.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.masterhandviolin.com/Blog17.html</a></p><p>Here is a photo of a graft on a violin I have, which I would need to have looked at in hand by an expert to have it evaluated (and not all luthiers are experts), but there are none anywhere close to me (I live in the sticks).</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]370592[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]370593[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is another violin I have where the neck graft is much more subtle.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]370595[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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