Hasta La Ideas

Christopher Moore studied Industrial Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology, but the ID field wasn’t enough to keep him; we lost him to the Chicago School of Violin Making. There he learned classical 17th- and 18th-Century crafting techniques, and for the past 16 years he’s run his own fine stringed instrument manufacturing and repair workshop in Wisconsin.

Moore submitted the following project to a Fine Woodworking contest, explaining where the raw materials came from: “I’m a cello maker and have lots of scraps from pegbox cut-offs. So I thought it would be cool to make a different sort of box from what I had lying around.”

I tried to include some of the design elements of a violin without having the end result look kitchy, and the violin corner makes for a nice lift on the lid. The hinge is made of ebony from an old fingerboard and was meant to somewhat allude to the tailpiece.

For the finish, I varnished it as I do my instruments, and then I antiqued it to try and make it look like a 200 year old, well-used sort of box. The materials are spruce, maple, and ebony.

Unsurprisingly, Moore won first place in FW’s “Build Outside the Box” challenge.