Bows, hairs and their relation

ayer

I have been rehairing lots of bows recently.

Some of respectable good quality, mainly French from  Bazin, Voirin Lamy Sartory but also German Nürnberger, Pfetzschner and German of lesser quality. and more modern, and some English ones Tubbs, Yeoman and other Hill workers.



I am trying to make a correlation between their weight, stiffness and balance, to learn what kind of hair would make each of them better.

I found that the three blue rings from Dictum works wonderfully on the top notch ones, but does not do a Nürnberger justice.

So it is not automatically the best hairs which give the best results for every one of them.

Besides that I found that the weight of the rehair has a big influence on the response of the bow.

If one uses more than 6 gr on a Tubbs the tone is no good anymore that is a known fact

But then how to decide on the weight of the rehair  with the other ones ?



Has anyone a system or is it all down to intuition?

I would be interested to hear your comments.

Monika

use about 2 sorts of hair, one more elastic than the other.

Less elastic plays with more attack and I use that for cello bows, while the other one gives a slightly smoother change in bowings. I make sure that the elastic is not extremely elastic (as that will give too many problems in my climate with extreme changes in humidity -around 80% at home compared to as low as 30% in some concert halls in winter...) and that the less elastic is not brittle or harsh.



For a violin bow I use between 160 to 200 hairs, both are exceptions. That depends on stiffness (and/or the ability of the frog to accomodate) only. A heavy bow stick is most of the times a stiff one as well. I do that by feel (but I am a player as well), but you can also measure stiffness. Simply support the stick behind head and at thumb (without hair), attach 1lb and measure deviation from without weight, using a fine micrometer scale.

Be sure to select your individual bow hanks from the bundle carefully as to my knowledge all commercially available hair has lots of defective hair in it!