Like many self-taught fiddlers who live in rural areas, I went along for years whittling bridges with my jack-knife, struggling with baling twine to get my sound-post right, and occasionally enlisting the aid of a local self-styled "Fixer-Upper" to do more serious damage to my instrument.

Scott, who was a conservator of instruments at the Smithsonian for many years, says that far more instruments are damaged over the years by inept attempts at repair than by neglect. It's never a real good idea to try to fix something when you have no idea what you're doing, but with something as delicate as a fiddle, unskilled maintenance can be truly disastrous.

Then I inherited a fine fiddle that had been originally my great-grandfather's. I knew it was a good instrument, but it hadn't been played in over thirty years. The strings had broken, the bridge and sound-post were down, the bows had no hair, and things were in a sorry state. I wanted to play it, but I didn't want to try to get it in playing condition myself. When it comes to fine woodworking, my skills don't go much beyond using a chainsaw. 

What I needed was a luthier--a highly skilled maker and restorer of violins. There probably isn't anybody like that closer than Boston, I thought, which is about two hundred miles away and anyway, I don't know how to find a luthier.

Then a neighbor remarked that I ought to go see Thurmond Knight, a violin, viola and cello maker who had recently moved to town. A luthier! And only four miles away!

He soon had the old fiddle in good playing condition. It needed work on the pegs and fingerboard as well as general set-up (bridge, sound post, and tailpiece adjustment and new strings.) As well as a fiddle doctor, I also discovered a good friend who gradually taught me quite a bit about how to take care of my beloved instrument.

And I got to thinking about how much easier it would have been had I known these things many years ago when I first started playing.  Hence this book.

                                                                                                                                      Burt Porter