French Bass full restoration

[Matthew Tucker]

The top is glueing together quite well. This is the first long crack after the turrets are removed and before cleanup and cleating. Looks a mess, but actually the repair is good.



This is the view from the other side, there were two parallel cracks but they've come together quite neatly! The wood is beginning to show through too, after some cleaning with warm water.



Here's the second long crack gluing. You can see the soundpost crack too; I mark the path of each crack with a chinagraph marker so I know exactly where I have to cleat later. Sometimes the glue line is virtually invisible.



This is one of the previous repairs, done quite well, but I don't like square cleats so I'll probably remove them and replace with diamond ones.
The bass-bar on this bass is exactly parallel with the centre seam.



This is a view of the soundpost crack before glueing. nasty.



There seems to be some kind of orange primer used at some point; perhaps its a ground?

[Craig Regan]

Very nice repair work, Matthew! Gluing up cracks on bass tops can be really frustrating, but it looks like you have it under control. Beautiful color on the top too!

Are you going to send a sample of the orange ground to the lab for ****ysis?

[John Delventhal]

Anything new with this?

[Matthew Tucker]

I have progressed somewhat with the top restoration, but have been overseas for six weeks and so everything ground to a halt. Will resume work on the bass soon and post more pics.

[Matthew Tucker]

You can see how worn the corners were here:





After gluing most of the belly cracks (I found a few more) I had a go at repairing the corners with my usual repair wood but i wasn't happy with the result, as the grain really didn't match. The grain on this bass top is wide at the flanks, and wavy. So I tried using the reed-by-reed technique i posted a link to a week ago.

I cut away a part of the damaged wood along the grain line, then glued in a single piece of wide grain spruce. Then trimmed it back, and then added another.









I'm working from the back here but i check the front to make sure the grain lines are reasonably straight. They will be covered in a dark varnish, but with purfling repaired they will look much better.

I addition, these corners - and a lot of the edges - will get a half-edging repair. so what you see above will be covered with perhaps 2-3mm of tighter grained spruce, which will be better for gluing to the blocks!

[Matthew Tucker]

As it happens ... in case anyone likes to watch.

This is a previous repair to the block area of the lower bout



However, cracks have developed along one side and i don't like the previous repair or the nail holes so I'm removing the old repair and replacing with new wood.



I've removed all but the last 2mm of the top wood and tapered the edges inwards so that the patch fits tightly and the repair edge doesn't align with any grain. I've lost a bit of the very brittle purfling near the saddle but this was falling away anyway.



That's the patch glued in. Still has to be planed flat.

There was a similar problem up the top end. 2" nails through the top had made a nasty mess and a fair bit of wood had come away when removing the top from the block. And a previous repair. You can see my first exploratory gouge to see whether I could do an inlay patch, but nup. Had to go further to make sure the repair was sound.



I had to remove only enough spruce till I got to reasonably sound wood. I filled the nail holes with sawdust and hide glue from the back; i'll do a better repair from the front, later.




here's the patch glued in, waiting to be trimmed back.

[Matthew Tucker]

This is what nails do to the edge! I've planed back the crumbly chipped edge back to clean wood.



closer, you can see what this spruce is like. Wavy, wide-grained, with a few brittle knotty bits at the flanks like this



or this bit of repeated trauma which has pulverised the spruce under the varnish. I have to plane back as far as i dare then do the rest with glue and new spruce edging.



This new spruce is much nicer to deal with and will properly strengthen the original edges. It will glue better, too.