Thursday, July 16, 2009

Helping out a friend...


So a few months ago my friend Andrew came to me and said, "Maureen, I want to refinish my flying V....". Without asking too many questions about WHY he wanted to dive into a project like this, I set him up at a bench and talked him through the process. Revarnishing/refinishing is never a really fun project. Aside from how tedious it is to remove the original finish (not to mention how this might affect the value of the instrument*,) it is also not so good on the ol' respiratory system. After a week of meticulously scraping the thick black coat of varnish off the guitar, we were down to the raw mahogany. Beautiful, really. A lovely light orange, with almost pink hues. Mahogany is one of those woods with an amazing amount of depth to their dimension. It seemed we could look at least 1/4" into the wood. Why would anyone want to cover this up with a matte, colored finish? Andrew, being the classy guy that he is, wanted to keep the guitar its natural color. So after another week of fine sanding and scraping we were ready to varnish. We applied a half a dozen hand rubbed coats of clear varnish and finished her off with a French Polish. Needless to say, we were both very happy with the way she turned out. Special thanks to Neil for the photo. (check out more of Neil's photo's at http://www.neildacosta.com/) And thanks to Andrew for the vision....it turned out to be a lot of fun.


*Refinshing/revarnishing is often not the best way to treat an instrument with some finish problems. It is better to "touch up" than it is to completely revarnish. Generally it is not okay to strip an instrument of it's original varnish. This can GREATLY affect it value and antiquity. More on this topic another day....

Monday, July 13, 2009

Here we go....

I'm very new to this blogging thing so bear with me. I figured, after 13 years of luthiery, maybe I should start to connect with the online bass world. I hope this blog can help to answer whatever questions you folks out there might have. I've devoted the past decade or so to learning the art of violinmaking, having worked under and with some of the world's best. I hope to continuously post current projects I am working on as well as some things I've done in the past. That's all for now. More to come.