Tradition fuels Port Clyde man’s handmade violins Yattaw says building instruments a hobby

PORT CLYDE – Music traditions are important to Clifton “Kip” Yattaw, whether they’re in the kinds of songs singers pass on from one generation to another or in the designs of violins he builds.

A musician for more than 40 of his 59 years, Yattaw has been around music for most of his life. He began building violins after repairing old ones he found in secondhand stores.

“When I started playing I bought an old junk job violin and learned how to repair it, using the old horsehide glue that you melted down,” he said in a recent interview in his Port Clyde home, where he lives with his wife, Cherie, of 41 years.

“I started by just repairing, and after looking them over, I thought I could build one, so I started building,” he said, adding that his first violin was built from a kit until he got the ambition to buy the raw material and build one from scratch.

Yattaw has just completed his 12th violin, a model of one played by the 19th century Italian virtuoso, Niccolo Paganini.

Yattaw begins a violin with a blueprint from which he makes the wooden templates for each section.

“I’ll just lay a flat piece of model plywood, and I’ll get the curvature and lay the template on the board lengthwise to give the shape of the back, and then get the curvature from the center out to each side,” he said. “I start with a plank and make the hump. The curvature is not bent but carved.”

He even has a template for the two F-holes cut in the top of a violin.

Yattaw said he uses quarter-sawn maple for the back, side and neck, spruce for the top and ebony for all the other parts. The internal parts are all spruce.

His favorite is spruce from the northwestern United States or from Italy, where the wood is light and gives a superior tonal quality, he said.

“Ninety-nine percent of the sound comes out of the spruce,” he said. “It has a very straight grain. It’s very dry like balsa wood. It’s very easy to carve. I can carve a whole front in three or four days, while the back takes me two weeks to carve because the maple is so hard,” he said.

The finish of an instrument takes hours of painstaking work. Highly selective about his coatings, Yattaw said he uses a special varnish that is imported from Italy.

“The finish is important,” he stressed. “If you don’t get that finish right, you end up sanding the whole violin down and starting again. It takes at least a week just to put the finish on.”

Holding up one he had just completed, he said, “This violin took me almost 200 hours.”

“It’s just a hobby,” he said. “If someone wants one of my violins, I’m honored that they want it.

“It’s a good hobby,” he added. “It’s something I can pass on after I’m gone. Some people can enjoy them for many years.”

Yattaw does violin making on his own time. An employee in the maintenance department of SAD 5 in Rockland for 27 years, he said he does a little bit of everything – carpentry, plumbing, whatever the school wants him to do. It keeps him busy.

His life as a musician goes back 40 years. A member of a bluegrass band called the Katahdin Valley Boys, Yattaw once played before 20,000 people at a bluegrass festival.

He said traditional violin playing also is an important pastime for him and his wife.

“All of our wives go when we play,” he said of the members of his band. “We see people, travel and, hopefully, come home with a few dollars in our pockets.

“For years I was on a recording contract for a band in Nashville. I did country, gospel albums, and played the guitar. I’ve probably made close to 40 albums,” he said.

He also wrote a love song, “I Found a Friend,” that stayed on the country-western Top 40 list for a month in 1980.

“I never took my wife and family with me in those days, and it burned me out. I said then that if I ever went on the road again, I’d take my wife with me,” he said.

“We all feel the same way about having our families along,” he said of the members of the Katahdin Valley Boys.

“The world would be a pretty depressing place if it wasn’t for music,” Yattaw said. “I really, really consider myself lucky. I can’t imagine not being able to play.”