I´m Tino Mixan and I´m buildung bows for nyckelharpa and here is my story about it 😉
My first Nyckelharpa I got in 2001 (or so) and in the beginning I played a lot. But I was already an active multi-instrumentalist (mostly strings and woodwinds) so I had at a point put more focus on my main instruments in my main band projects. So the Nyckelharpa felt in a long sleep, but while playing also fiddle, the swedish music and so the nyckelharpa was always present.
In the year 2014 happened something strange. By accident I won an auction in Vienna (Austria) an old Nyckelharpa build in 1943. With the original bow, the original case and some old photographys inside. It turned out that this instrument was build by August Bohlin (the inventor of the modern chromatic nyckelharpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Bohlin ) and it was also HIS personal instrument. ( Compare the two pictures) Here comes an unanswered question - how this very specific instrument came to Vienna to an instrument auction. I got later two small hints, but we never really know it :-/ But it came into the right hands. 😉
On this Instrument there was not to much to do to make it playable again. In the workshop of the Luthier Nupi Jenner we replaced the strings, reconstructed the bridge and got the pegs working – and voilá !!! So I started playing nyckelharpa again.
But after a while playing and practising I recognized that I couldnt go technical go further on in cause of the right bow. The old-style nyckelharpabow didnt work that much for me and also the baroque-style bows (which invented after the nyckelharpa entered the old-music-scene) wasn´t that what I´m looking for. The solution had to be somewhere in the middle. So, I had to go on myself and luckily I learned working with wood in the past. With the support of Lena Galle-Hamelbeck (bowmaker in Vienna) and Nupi Jenner (Luthier, also in Vienna) I had the possibilty to develop my own models for Nyckelharpabows. After a while, building some prototypes, I had chance to meet various Nyckelharpaplayers for getting lots of nice feedback. At this point I would thank Josefina Paulson ( www.josefinapaulson.se ), she was the person who forced me the most to go further on with bowmaking for nyckelharpas.
Since then I built a lot of bows and developing them constantly......