French Bass full restoration

[Ken McKay]

Matthew, since you are on the other side of the planet you should have taken the back off first, oh well too late now.

Fine looking bass there! Good luck with her.

To carve the back brace out it shouldn't be to difficult. You might be able to get some controlled splitting and remove the big chunks first, then once down to a bit thinner, you can plane it or keep using a sharp thin headed gouge, finger planes and then wet the last slivers with a damp cloth to remove the splinters and clean the glue off.

[Craig Regan]

Looks like a nice project Matthew. Give it your best!

[Brian Gencarelli]

Looks like fun! Love the photo essay! Keep it coming- if you have the time, please!

BG

[Pino Cazzaniga]

Thank you for sharing, Matthew, nice instrument and a lot of work to face!
Did you measured the stop length from the end of the heel or from the upper edge of the front?

[Matthew Tucker]

Edge of the heel

[Matthew Tucker]

Here’s a summary of the ironwork I’ve removed from this patient to date:



I had a look to see if the tuners had any identifying marks, but nothing exciting to report. Some of the brass plates are worn at the bearings, but the brass cogs, spindles and the worm gears are perfectly fine. We’ll have to decide whether its worth getting the bearings rebuilt, rebushed or just get new tuners. I’m not a metalworker.



Here’s another bit of fun for later :-(



I started gluing some of the newer and cleaner cracks first, and cleaning up glueing edges.



My “in situ” lamp is very useful.



Here’s a horrible mess to clear up. Nails didn’t help at all.



Here’s a closeup of one of the crack edges. The wider part is where the crack sits just below the FFs and the thinner part - about 6-7mm - is the lower bout.
I have had to break the longer cracks right open in order to properly clean the gluing surfaces, which are contaminated with varnish and dust and goo. And what looks like read lead paint in places!



This is a dry run of the first big crack clamping setup. It gets tricky near the FFs where the wood has twisted under bridge pressure. It’s going to be interesting getting this to clamp up tightly.

[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?