While a violin can be made entirely with hand tools, and for most of it's history those were the only tools available, the advantage conferred by power tools is too great to be ignored. You can do without these, but if you want to save yourself lots of time and energy you will find it very much to your advantage to use power tools for those jobs that can be done best by them.
For all that I just wrote I have to add that the total time spent using power tools to make a violin is an hour or two at the most. I have no idea how long it would take to do the same jobs by hand, but I would suspect a week or two at my present level of skill and I doubt that the results would be as good.
First and foremost I consider the drill press the most important labor saver in my shop. I have a bench top Delta 12" drill press bolted to the top of a roll around tool box I got from Home Depot. The toolbox has most of my hand tools and carving tools and makes a good (but slightly tall) base for the drill press. The major accessories I have are a good set of brad point bits, which make very clean holes in wood, a Safe-T-Planer which saves a lot of hand work, and a set of sanding drums along with an oscillating sanding attachment. I would guess I spent around $170 or so on my brand new drill press, and another $20 on drill bits. The Safe-T-Planer ran around $40 and the oscillating sander attachment I got for a mere 50 bucks. I probably spent another 20 or 30 on various sizes of sanding drums.
(I don't think Delta makes the oscillating sander attachment any more. It is awkward to mount properly and I'm sure Delta had a lot of complaints. I'd complain too, but I can live with it's problems considering that I can get good results with it. I also mounted a table on the base of the attachment. A sanding drum in a drill press will leave horizontal lines in the wood which have to be hand sanded off. An oscillating sander will produce work with no lines on it and a smoother finish for a given grade of sandpaper. If you can get one and can put up with it's minor problems it is worth the effort, since it gives a smoother finish than a sanding drum alone and is easy to add a vacuum hose to. )
I mounted a large (16" by 24") baltic birch plywood table onto the drill press table as a work surface. I can clamp the base of the oscillating sander to the table for thickness sanding ribs, or I can clamp a fence so I can use the Safe-T-Planer for thicknessing wood (but not ribs!) I also mount a disk under the planer and use that to take the edges of the violin plates down to thickness. That was my first use of the planer and it finished the edges in minutes. I had been working on the back of the violin and had spent a week slowly carving away the edges in flame grained maple, trying to avoid lifting a chip. Using the Safe-T-Planer I finished the job almost instantly, and took about twenty minutes to lay out and do the same job on the top! Boy, was I ever hooked on that Safe-T-Planer! It can remove wood faster than you can think if you do something wrong, but no matter what your approach, violin making always takes careful work and thinking.
If I were to buy another drill press it would be a radial arm type. There are some things that can't be done with a normal drill press, and roughing out a top or bottom plate using contours at different levels would be easier on a drill press with greater reach. In fact, I think I could do a cello, a bass viola da gamba or an archtop guitar. This would be both a time saver and a means of quickly making very accurate plates. It is also possible to drill the hole for the end pin using a radial arm drill press, and that simple job is easier to do by hand if you have a standard drill press.
The drill press has a few other uses, but you get the idea, it helps a lot.
I also have a small bandsaw. It is a nine inch Ryobi, and it saves a lot of work also. I have used it to saw wood to use for ribs, so, small as it is, there is resawing work that can be done on it. I am pretty handy with coping saws and I could probably get by easier without the bandsaw than I could without the drill press. I like having it and I wouldn't be without it, but if it was one or the other the drill press is more important to me. The bandsaw was in the $160-170 range and I bought a few extra blades for very little money. I guess that the most important job I do on it is saw out necks.
The remaining power tool in my shop is my Dremel Tool. I have a page devoted to the Dremel Tool, and it tells the story better than any words I write here. I would like to learn to cut a purfling groove by hand one of these days, but the Dremel Tool makes it so easy that there is not much point to spending hours nibbling away to make a so-so groove when I can make an excellent one in minutes. (Or ruin the groove with the tiniest slip!) Dremel tool sets are around 80 bucks with a bunch of accessories that I almost never use and a box that holds the accessories. The Dremel tool is usually in the holder I made for it, so there is a lot of empty space in the box. I have just started laminating purfling as an experiment, and I have modified my Dremel purfling cutter to handle a saw blade set just above a small table so I can slice purfling with it.
The C shaped piece of wood in the upper left is a lamination of two pieces of ebony with a middle layer of poplar. I like to use wood purfling, but when bending the pieces for the C bouts it seems to break just a hair short of being finished. I decided to try laminating veneer to see if I could make pre-bent purfling.
I am a little worried that the dust from the ebony scrapings will discolor the wood of the top since I had that problem with the tailpiece saddle, but I can't resist trying it.
The purfling is sitting on the mould I used to laminate it. I bent the thinned down veneers on the bending iron, then glued them with thin hide glue. I coated all surfaces and stuck the thing together with a couple of big clamps.
Once it was together I transferred the assembly to the vise on my workbench. This is one job that I wanted to clamp very tightly.
I left it overnight and didn't touch it 'til I came home from work the next day. It is impressivly rigid.
In this picture you can see that the setup I use to slice the individual C bout purflings off the lamination is just a table mounted on the dremel tool holder I made to cut the purfling groove and start the channel around the edge of the violin plates.
The saw blade is surrounded by little pieces of plywood glued to the table. They are a big help in controlling the lamination as I slice pieces off. I am planning some improvements, but the set-up as shown works.
It took me several tries before I cut my first successful piece off.
I now have to make one for the upper and lower bouts.
If the ebony dust is a problem I also have some dyed poplar. The standard used in the early days of violin making is dyed pear wood with a poplar center.
BTW, the veneers are thinned to 0.5 mm for the ebony and 0.6 for the poplar, and I thinned them on my drill press using a sanding drum. I plan to give a try to 0.4 for the outer plys and 0.8 for the center next time.
