French Bass full restoration

[Thomas Erickson]

Well, I hear the spiral bush is a good solution when the cheek is cracked through the peg hole. Clearly more significant on an instrument with a true peg that has to press in, sure, since it will perpetually open the crack - but also seems like a sound idea to me when we'd be talking about placing it inside of a plain bush anyway and the top half of the pegbox is broken off at the holes... Makes sense to me to put the pegbox as solid as possible with new wood, and then reinforce the spot where it broke (the holes) even more; clearly the original wood in that spot is less than ideal or the neck would have broken first and spared the pegbox, yes?

(Pure speculation of course - I'm not qualified! )

[Matthew Tucker]

i have never done a spiral bushing but as far as i know the technique uses a thin spiral of woodshaving in the hole. I fail to see how this can be a structural repair on a head this size!

Possibly better is to plug the hole, drill out a larger hole say 1" and plug THAT, then rebore the shaft hole in the new wood. The conical bushing is a variant of this and I think nicer.

But I'm not sure yet that's what's needed here.

[Thomas Erickson]

Nor do I know what is ideal in this situation.

But the deal with the spiral bush is all in the grain orientation - you're placing the long grain of the "slice" perpendicular to the grains that have split across the peg hole. So you have the wood fibers supporting the first (expanding) load of the peg, rather than the glue joint between grains.

[Steve Alcott]

It's been a while, and I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering how it's going.

[Matthew Tucker]

OK so I've been a bit busy ... and now I need TWO pairs of specs for this sort of work



remember this? The cracked block needed to be replaced.







some twit used nails in the top edge of the ribs.



more ironwork for the collection!



A lot of steam, water, heatgun, leverage and cursing later, the block came away with the ribs unscathed.

[Matthew Tucker]

remember what it used to be like in there?



YUK! All that black crap had to be wetted, heated and scraped off.





here is the new block being glued in with temporary cauls.





Yes its a multi-piece block.

You can see how the upper edge has been damaged by those pesky nails.



I'll have to trim those rib edges off neatly. I'll lose about a cm off the top of the original rib, but it is no big consequence.

The block is intentionally oversized and will need some trimming too.

[Steve Alcott]

Thanks, Matthew-I'm sure I'm not the only one who's fascinated by and learning a great deal from your account of this major restoration.