sometimes archaic technology is fine.

By default, the bowed strings use the same string attachment/adjustment design that every stringed instrument in human history used, until the Industrial Revolution: simple friction pegs, stuck in holes and turned as needed. I imagine this must have been quite an art before precision tools; now you can easily buy a reamer (for the holes) and a...peg...shaving...thing. It's like a pencil sharpener, but shapes the peg's barrel to match the shape the reamer makes in the hole.

Instruments like the guitar and bass quickly converged on geared tuners, because of their greater string tension, but the violin, viola, and cello have kept their friction pegs, on the grounds of being simple, functional, predictable, and lightweight, and being a safe baseline condition for these amazing instruments which can easily last hundreds of years with some care. Attempts at improvement have mostly failed for being too heavy––for the violin and viola, that weight falls at the end of your outstretched arm, like a see-saw, and the extra mass can sometimes inhibit vibration in undesirable ways––or requiring some kind of permanent alteration, like bigger holes, or gluing some kind of bushing into the hole. In the 1800s, you could do that (and more!) to your 300-year old Italian violin and probably no one would care; over time, violins, including almost every Stradivarius, had their neck extended to accommodate changing musical needs. 

(There is exactly one Strad in original condition, called the Messiah, and it lives a sheltered life in the Ashmolean Museum. It gets brought out every so often for virtuosi to play, because sufficiently powerful instruments, for lack of a better term, get crabby and temperamental when they're not played. I've played violins in their crabby state. My acoustic guitar probably qualifies, also.)

Of course, with modern technology, people set to work and designed things that look like regular friction pegs, but actually have complex gearing inside. They're non-invasive to install, and seem to just work. They're in use on at least one Stradivarius. I don't have them, because I'm not proud and I just have fine-tuners on the strings, because the orthodox use of tuning pegs hurts my hand, and heterodox use is just annoying.

ANYWAY.

I was thinking maybe it's time to change the strings, because I've been playing on them non-stop for about 9 months. I've never changed a violin string on a nice instrument before. Easy enough, I look for instructions.

The Internet reminded me that friction pegs do not do their work efficiently without a coating, because they have to do two opposite things:

1. Turn smoothly, with minimal friction, when pulled away from the pegbox.
2. Refuse to turn at all, using the friction between the peg and its holes, when pushed into the pegbox.

The homemade way to do this is with a coating of classroom chalk and a coating of soap (or maybe the other way around), but the most venerable option is W.E. Hill Peg Compound, which has this mind-bending list of ingredients:

• Graphite powder (lubricant)
• Petroleum Jelly (lubricant)
• China clay (sticky)
• Talc (lubricant and sometimes sticky)
• Red Iron Oxide (fancy name for rust: rough and granular)

That's...interesting. The instrument does need it, or at least mine does. I replaced the middle string first, then had to re-do it later, not just because it's the middle string and blocks access to other strings, but I only put the peg dope on one of the two contact surfaces (each peg has one for each wall of the pegbox) and it wouldn't stay remotely in tune.

The effort was worth it, since the violin is now singing and ringing the way it first was, which, I'd mostly forgotten, might be a bit much.

There are, of course, more difficult things to tune: