Hi! I’m David Kaynor for expertvillage.com and I’m going to talk about some precautions
on, or risk associated with violin bows. A fairly easy one to talk about is simply vulnerability
of bow hair: its hair it cuts with scissors or any other sharp object really easily. All
you have to do is catch a hair on something like the fine tuner of a fiddle and you can
pull, stretch and break hairs quiet easily. You can also break hairs by playing real hard,
but I’d say in my case I tend not to break bow hairs from playing as much as one just
handling my bow carelessly, so that’s a good watchword: handle a bow carefully. There’s
some risk of over tightening the hair, the tighter you tighten hair the more stress you
put on the hair itself and on the stick, and I’ve seen bow hair tighten so much that
stick is actually pulled into a reverse curve, and both the hair and the stick survived to
play again. But I would say that it’s risky and I’d avoid it, I wouldn’t ever tighten
bow hair so that there was more about a maximum of a third of an inch between the rib and
the hair and the stick. Another area of the bow which is really vulnerable is the area
up around the tip. For one thing it’s an incredibly thin shaft of wood here; it’s
part of its beauty and it’s part of what makes the violin bow play with the amount
of spring and animation that it has. But it’s also a very, very thin piece of wood, and
therefore a violin bow should never be, I’m now going to demonstrate what should never
be done. It should never be wrapped on anything, the violin bow should never be struck against
anything, it should never be pushed against anything, the very tip of the bow is arguably
more ornamental than structural, but when something looks that nice and it’s already
there, why mess with it, and so the violin tip should never be struck against anything
or stressed against anything.