He Won’T Play Second Fiddle

Whatever Perry Tefft wants, he makes.

China closets, knickknack shelves, grandfather clocks. Spinning wheels, weaving looms, miniature steamships.

Muzzleloaders, skinning knives, tomahawks. Gatling guns, sleighs, tools.

Even violins.

“I like diversity,” he says.

He speaks little and smiles less, but his hands rarely rest.

“Even when he’s sitting, he’s doing this,” Perry’s wife, Lurlene, says, twiddling her thumbs.

Perry was a state highway engineer in 1968 when his brother tried to talk him into making violins.

His brother knew a violin craftsman who was retiring who wanted to pass on his trade. Perry had worked with wood since he was a kid, but wasn’t interested.

“I had enough hobbies,” he says.

A few weeks later, highway workers found an old book on violin-making in a house scheduled for demolition. Perry traded a few tanned elk hides for it.

“I thought it was fate,” he says.

The fragile stringed instruments didn’t intimidate him. He’d pounded, filed and tempered steel into razor-sharp knives that sliced animal skin as if it were butter.

He’d whittled a full-length, rear view of a naked woman onto a rifle stock, defining each toe, curve and strand of flowing hair.

He’d built two miniature hand-crank Gatling guns mounted on green spoke wheels without a pattern - and they worked.

“Violins looked like they would be a challenge,” he says.

His first attempt hangs with the old ice skates in the basement laundry room now, next to the water heater. He followed instructions in a book, which he rarely does, and took the finished instrument to his brother’s friend for evaluation.

“There was plenty wrong,” he says, and leaves it at that. “I thought I’d better make a better one.”

He alternately built violins and anything else that struck his fancy until he retired in 1994.

When spinning fascinated him, Perry built a spinning wheel, spun raw wool into yarn, then built an organ-sized loom.

He wove a homespun serape in varying shades of red, and still wears it.

When a corner of his dining room begged for a grandfather clock, Perry cut cherry wood into a cabinet with ornate circular cutouts by its peak. He sculpted two, foot-tall women to guard the inner clockworks.

The wooden sentinels are nude. Their arms wrap around their breasts in a swirl of smooth curves that start at the hips.

He rebuilt a maroon 1934 Ford from the engine up, and constructed a steam engine from scratch to power his steamboat.

Violins became an important movement in his creation symphony.

He made them to make them better. To that end, he and Lurlene went to grange hall dances where Perry analyzed the fiddles’ sounds.

The back of his Post Falls garage evolved into a violin workshop. Perry filled empty red Velvet Smoking Tobacco cans with pegs and clamps he made himself. He collected a forest of files, knives, chisels and gouges.

He used curly maple for his violin backs and pine or spruce for the tops. He learned from every effort.

By the time he retired, Perry was ready to take his hobby a step further. He’d checked out the Violinmakers Association of Arizona International convention in 1971 and hadn’t returned because it interfered with hunting season.

Handmade violins are judged at the convention for tone, workmanship and varnish.

Perry was ready to return and win.

He pulled on his blue Ziggy’s ballcap and magnifying glasses, lighted his pipe and scanned a few wedges of ragged wood. He kept the ones with no wormholes or bark spots.

Down came the patterns he’d cut, gouges he’d fashioned and a measuring tool he’d engineered. He clamped, chiseled and glued with a mind reader’s concentration.

Violin tops and backs require hand-gouging to reach the right thickness. Perry drilled dozens of tiny holes on each piece first as depth guides.

“I don’t leave anything to feel. I measure everything,” he says.

He gave a few of the 41 instruments he’s finished to family and friends. Perry’s granddaughter plays violin. He sold others to students. Lundin’s Violins in Spokane has sold several. They’re classified as American handmakers’ instruments rather than violins made commercially or by European masters.

“He makes a very nice playing violin,” owner Clair Lundin says. “I look for craftsmanship and value. I rate the performance before I accept one. You have to have a special talent to make violins.”

Perry returned to the Arizona competition in 1998 and didn’t win. He entered four violins last year and won fifth place for tone. He’s already crafted four more to enter next year.

“I want top honors,” he says, running a work-worn finger over his No. 40 violin. His finger savors a graceful dip in the wood by the F holes.

“I think this is the best I’ve made,” he says. And he smiles.