After more than 50 years handcrafting violins in his cramped Winston Road workshop, Harold Golden has one more violin to go before he stops making his prize-winning classical copies for good.

The Chestnut Hill luthier won’t continue repairing instruments, either, except for rentals, longtime customers and emergencies. He will keep teaching music for a couple of years, but after that … who knows?

“I’m 80 now, and it’s tough to keep physical things going,” Golden said, “and my wife (Beatrice) passed away last year, which crushed me. I’ve been walking around saying, what am I doing? What am I doing? And I decided I have to stop doing those things.”

Judging by Golden’s workshop, there’s a lot to give up.

Nearly 20 of his handsome violins dangle from hooks on the wall. They’re accompanied by purchased guitars and a bluegrass mandolin — and even one rotund handmade mariachi bass, constructed for him by a craftsman on the outskirts of Guatemala City. His son’s fluffy white Samoyed, Snowy, drops by briefly, takes an interest in the new visitor — as witness an insistent snout poking at a notebook — but after a while gives up when that interest is not reciprocated and quietly trots off, ignoring the stuffed dog toys littering the workshop’s oriental-style carpets. Up on the opposite wall on a shelf sits chunks of spruce and maple, light woods used to make his violins.

Wearing a Chinese Year of the Wooden Horse T-shirt, Golden reflects on a lifetime devoted to his craft. He is sitting in the shadow of his painstakingly produced works of art, violins that take about 300 hours to produce.

Golden was still a teenager, he recalls, when he realized he had an aptitude for fixing things. Even then, he was a musician. At 14 years old, Golden created his own guitar from a kit, which he still has. He has loaned it to one of his students. (“It still works,” he says.) As a teen, he began repairing his friends’ guitars.

Eventually he was making more instruments, and then he secured his first — and ultimately only — job in the Philadelphia School District, where he taught music, but only after one relatively brief hitch. He went to the Board of Education for his first meeting, he says, “and the next day we were on strike. So I figured, it looks like I have to do something else.”

That something else was a job at Zapf’s Music Store at 5th and Tabor in the Olney neighborhood. And that, in turn, led to a lifetime dedicated to making violins, in addition to what ultimately became a 25-year career teaching instrumental music in four different Philadelphia schools.

“I applied for a job at Zapf’s, and I showed them the stuff I made,” he said, and they took me into the shop.”

What followed was a nine-year apprenticeship with German violin maker Sofian Zapf. While working at Zapf’s, he also began taking violin-making lessons from Carleen Maley Hutchins, a master violin craftsperson.

“Carleen was teaching violin-making up in Montclair, N.J.,” Golden said. “So every Saturday, I was in Montclair. I would leave here and drive up at 7 in the morning. I would stop at a bakery in town and get bread because everybody had to bring something.”

Hutchins taught Golden a system called plate tuning “where you have the back and front of your violin and they’re not yet glued on the instrument. You put them on a vibrating machine where you have a loudspeaker pumping air through them and you put Christmas glitter and it forms a pattern,” Golden said. “From that pattern, you know where to scrape the wood. You keep scraping until you get rid of all the fuzz. Now, that instrument is going to sound good. And that’s what I do.”

Golden followed that with another apprenticeship with another master violin maker at 4th and Bainbridge streets in Queen Village.

During the week, he would teach in the schools, and at night until 9 he pulled a shift at Zapf’s. “I saw my family very little,” he said with a tinge of regret. “I worked to keep things going, to live here and have everything my wife and son needed. I worked 12- and 14-hour days, and on Saturdays I learned violin making.”

Along the way, Golden learned various techniques, including a way to hand mix a thick molasses-like varnish that produced the best sounding violins.

His violins grew in popularity, and he won awards for his work, including one from the British Violin Making Association. “I was the only Yank,” he said. Golden also earned first place from the Arizona Violin Makers Association. That prize-winner was a replica of a Guadagnini, after Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, hailed as the greatest violin maker of the latter half of the 18th century.

“I never in a million years thought I would win that contest,” he recalled. “I was so happy when I called my wife and told her that I’d won. It was so cool.”

Although Golden expresses surprise, those successes came at the hand of a perfectionist. “My biggest enjoyment is to try to make instruments sound better,” he said. “That was the whole structure of my thinking. You can make a violin, and it sounds like a violin, but I wanted it to sound good. My goal was to search for a way to make a violin sound like the old Italian instruments. And I have some pretty darn good sounding instruments.”

What makes this celebrated career so interesting is that it was so unlikely.

“When my wife married me, I was a professional string bass player and classical guitar player,” Golden said. “What started me on violin was working for the Board of Education. I had to teach violin, so I had to play violin. Then I started fixing violins because the kids would break them constantly.”

All of that — or most of it — is behind Golden now. But making music certainly is not. He plays guitar and mandolin, but more recently he fell in love with “this little Irish box” — a two-row button accordion. Though you might suppose Golden’s background is entirely in classical music, he has diverse tastes. He has always been interested in Irish music, and he continues to learn. It’s good for your brain, he said.

“When I started playing accordion, I thought … this is great,” Golden said. “I’m playing silly little things, but it’s so much fun. My whole thing now is, I have to figure out how to have fun because this past year has been so miserable. It’s time that I have fun. So, I play as much as I can.”