French Bass full restoration

[Matthew Tucker]

No there's no previous half-edging. In blending the new wood with the old, I have planed a thin layer of crud off the old wood so that the inside arch is a smooth transition to the new edge. In fact this bass had a very thick ledge around the edges and in places I have removed the surplus, because it's really not necessary. What you can see from left to right is ... dark old spruce, clean old spruce, shiny new white spruce.

The top has been repaired before, but most of the cleats have just popped off - I suspect because they were glued over the "patina" which isn't as good a glueing surface as a clean wood surface. I was going to leave the very dark old surface wherever I could, and just clean under the cleats, but now that I can see the lovely old spruce underneath I'm considering scraping the whole top back to clean; this would reveal all previous cracks and be much easier to repair now and in the future. But it would involve removing a very thin layer, say 0.3mm, all over.

I'm not intending to regraduate the top; there's nothing wrong with the thicknesses, and its sufficiently thick that removal of a very thin layer won't structurally weaken the top. The amount of wood I would remove would be much less than the additional wood I'll be adding in cleats. What do you think?