French Bass full restoration

[Matthew Tucker]

Not much change since you last saw it at Oberlin!



As you may recall, after gluing the bits together again



I let Robbie loose with his jig



and before too long the mortise was formed.



then we cleaned up the nice grafting block you sold me



made some more fluffy shavings and chalk dust



and fit the neck nicely into the mortise





It made it back here with the rest of my tools and tonewood, in one piece and without grief from customs officials



and is now on my second bench waiting for the weekend when i can crank up the bandsaw to cut some new cheeks.

[Brian Gencarelli]

That's great! I was wondering how you made out with the travel case. It was a pleasure sharing a bench with you. Got to see the process up close and personal.

Can't wait to see it recheeked and all finished!

Best,
Brian

[Arnold Schnitzer]

Nice pics and work, Matthew. Brian, will you be starting up a thread on your endpin experiments soon? How is the Tarrantino sounding?

[Brian Gencarelli]

Hey Arnold,

Yes, I am still working on some ideas, but things are going well. Harrison is in town and I had him play it for me with a couple of different pins. I think I may just plug the regular endpin hole with a tailpiece hanger and just use the Laborie. I am starting to get used to it. Been tweaking the set up some, and I about have it dialed in. It sounded really good with John playing this morning.

I will be posting some things on it in the next few weeks. I just finished reorganizing my shop and now I can actually walk to my Lathe! Now that I have figured out how to play in that position, I can experiment with the different materials.

Best,
Brian

[Steve Alcott]

So how's the bass coming along, Matthew?

[Matthew Tucker]

OK, OK


Once the graft was glued, I checked the cheeks and back.



The repair join was good, but it was a toss-up between an inlay repair of the back of the scroll and re-doing the cheeks. Given the state of the scroll, I decided to re-cheek as well. Also, there is the little broken bit of the edge that I put somewhere and now cannot find ...



While I was waiting for suitable repair wood to arrive from Europe, I hollowed out the pegbox.

That's the Lignum Vitae carver's mallet my Mum gave me a few years back.



The black mark is a woodpecker peck, or a nail hole, or something. It doesn’t worry me as it’s not in a critical position. I may chisel it out altogether eventually.




The sides were planed back as little as possible and holes filled where needed with new maple. These will mostly be covered and the holes drilled out again, but a bit of repair wood in there will minimise splitting.









The scroll this morning, new cheeks and in process of shaping. I was careful to document the chamfer before planing off the sides, so I can try to make the new chamfer as close to the original.



The sides of the scroll will be probably 1.5mm thicker than the original, and I will probably finish the top of the cheeks with a gentle scoop into the existing volute, instead of a smooth transition, as I want to keep a good thickness of wood up near the top of the pegbox where it counts.

On the pic below I have redrilled the guideholes for the tuners; I measured these with calipers using triangulation from the lower corners before gluing on the cheeks. You can also see a tiny hole where I used a pin to accurate register the cheeks for gluing.



The new cheeks were cut from a flamed violin back wedge. Even though the grafting neck block itself was rather plain maple, I decided it would be a pity not to try to match the flame on the rest of the instrument, in the scroll. Due to the smallish size of the back wedge, the flame is angled back a few degrees from normal.

It's nice flame, pity my lighting is so crap.

[Steve Alcott]

Looks great, your lighting is fine, and thanks for keeping us up to date on the progress.