Virzi?

[mandology]

I heard Mike Marshall talking about pulling a virzi out of his mandolin years ago; I looked at some pictures of Dudenbostel building a mandolin for Thile, and I saw what a virzi is, now what the heck is it? What does it do?

Grant

[phynie]

Check this link out and see if it helps any.
http://www.mandolincafe.com/archives/faq.html#virzi

[mandology]

Thanks!

[JeffS]

One question I have is how do they get the virzi out? Do they remove the front or back or do they just gank it through the f hole with a coat hanger?

[thistle3585]

In Mike's own words' when he was CGOW.

"It was a full moon night, (that much I remember) in Oakland CA on Park Blvd in the basement apartment of an old house that Todd Phillips was renting. He is quite a good craftsman and at the time he had a shop set up doing instrument repairs and such.

He had Frank Wakefield's Loar there at the time and was refinishing it. Frank had spray painted the face of it red using epoxy paint. So Todd and I were scraping all of this stuff off using Acetone, cue tips and toothpicks getting inside each grain. It was nasty work but we did it and Todd put a very nice varnish finish back on it.

So we decided to take out my virzi on this night.

Todd took a really long screw driver and bent it just right so that we could stick it in through the end pin hole and smack it with a hammer and dislodge that sucker.

Well... I cradled the mando on the bench like a football and he stuck that thing in there and gave it a smack with a hammer. (!) Well ..... nothing happened. That thing didn't budge! We both were amazed. So he did it a couple of more times until finally we heard this loud crack and clearly something had happened.

It turns out that these things are pinned in with a tiny nail into the face. They are also inlayed into the tone bars. So they don't come out very easily.

It did eventually drop however and then we had to figure out how to get it out of the mandolin. So were had to break the Virzi by lifting up on one side of it through the F hole while holding down the other side of it through the other F hole.

It was quite a nasty experience generally but it came out in two pieces and we glued it back together and I have it on my mantle. I thought of it as an historic moment for sure so I ran a tape recorder of the whole procedure. We have this whole episode on tape someplace. I'll burn a cd of it one of these days for you real trivia freaks.

Shortly after that John Monteleone put new tone bars in it and did some light regraduating on the face. It did sound a lot better. Actually the basic character of tone didn't change that much at all but it just felt looser and you didn't have to play it for 20 minutes for it to open up as was the case before.

[thistle3585]

Sorry, here's the whole interview.

mike marshall (http://www.co-mando.com/resources/CGOW/mikemarshall.php)