I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story. I’ve played many concerts with a violinist whose violin was made in about 1600 and whose bow probably dates from the late 1700s, and just recently I played with a cellist whose three-hundred-and-forty-five-year-old cello is one of the most