French Bass full restoration

[Matthew Tucker]

Father's Day here. Bacon and eggs for breakfast ... and a day in the workshop!

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Here's another reason I feel the half edging is necessary on this plate:



The wood is brittle and knotty in spots all around the edges; this is a weak point, has cracked before, and even to plane it down I need to wet it down and use a very sharp blade.

Here it is after thinning the edge carefully, and a piece of repair spruce that looks like a bear wiped its backside on it. Other than the staining, it's fine repair wood!



You never have too many clamps.



After the glue has dried the edges are carefully trimmed and blended into the original top shape, and then thinned to the original 8mm. Sounds easy, eh!











Next job is the soundpost patch.

[Eric Hochberg]

Question, Matthew. On the 2nd to last pic above, is your new half edging going over a previous half edging job (it looks like the grain doesn't line up under yours)?

[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?

[Matthew Tucker]

Now where was I?

Oh yes ... remember this great big soundpost crack?



I glued it up well, but if this isn't reinforced properly the glued-up crack will just bust again when the pressure's on. So, working from the back, I make an oval patch from spruce and trace around it, then start hogging out a bit of a hole.







Mustn't get carried away ...



I like this next pic, because it shows up the depth of the lovely darkening of the wood due to age! The nice brown coloration is full 2-3mm into the wood. Someone who has done this on many more basses that I have (like Arnold, or Ken) could probably date the thing looking at the colour alone.

You can see the original crack entering at the left and a slightly darker area where it is glued. I'm careful about the final shape of the curved bed.



Next step is to spot glue some guides for the patch to make sure it always goes back exactly in the same spot. There a many ways to do this, and this is the way i'm doing it, this time! The grain of the patch is slightly offset from the grain in the top.



Now that the glue is drying, I have to do some work work.

[Craig Regan]

Question Matthew, Is it possible to see a picture of the edge repair from the front, or edge of the plate? Thanks, Craig

[Matthew Tucker]

I think this is what you want to see Craig.



I have not worked on shaping the edges yet. And i'm going to have to sweat over the purfling in the corners :-/

[Matthew Tucker]

The soundpost inlay patch is shaping up well. I'll finish it off and glue it in tonight after the gig.