French Bass full restoration

[Ken Smith]

Originally Posted by Matthew Tucker

No-one ventured an opinion on my question on scraping the dark crud back to clean wood in post #32, so I made a judgement that it would be better to shave a very thin layer off and make sure I make good glue repairs, than leaving it there for the looks only. The wood is still darkened with oxidation, and there is no doubt about the age of the instrument.

I think that when my basses have been restored, they were cleaned as needed but I don't know if they were scraped. Inside, the color varies. Where it was repaired, it is lighter. Where it wasn't repaired, it remained darker but without the built up dirt over the wood. On one old bass the bassbar was slightly re-shaped. The color shows where it was worked. One of the cross bars removed also shows it was trimmed down a bit half way thru its life by the two shades of color, both old. If re-graduated internally, the bass will always look lighter but that is unavoidable with the wood coming off.

On the aging, you can see how deep the oxidation goes when working on it. Some basses are so old that the wood is dark all the way through. I don't know how to date a bass by its wood color. I guess the oxidation depends on where and how the bass was kept or used.

Keep up the good work.