Lute soundboard finishes [Picture] - created 11-05-2006

Abraham, Jameel - 11/05/2006.12:52:31

I know that this discussion has been rehashed, but I thought I would ask for specific finshes and techniques. I know Lundberg uses a wax based finish. My question really is why a wax-based finish vs. shellac. I would think that the shellac would affect the tone less since it dries and becomes brittle, whereas wax always remains soft. I'm building a cedar top oud, and would like to bring some of the color out without a thick film. So I'm debating between FP and Lundberg's technique. I'm leaning toward a very thin FP, perhaps rubbed out to a satin or flat sheen to retain the traditional unfinished look.

I don't know anything about lutes, but I would hate a wax-based finish. It offers no protection and would wear very quickly, so I wouldn't use it.

If you want that grayish, worn look of the traditional unfinished lute soundboards, why don't you just leave it unfinished?

Arnt--one reason is that modern players don't like that look. Most anyway prefer the instrument age slowly and in a less grungy even though historically accurate way. ;-)

Jameel--I ended up using shellac spit coats. Larry Brown had an interesting article somewhere years ago about using a thin sprayed coat of laquer--I think spraying would be a great way to lay on a minimal coat of whatever one is using.

Of course many used egg, and there has been speculation that egg was used historically, although more recent evidence is apparently that nothing was used?

As to wax, Bob Lundberg used his own very special recipe blended from high-tech modern waxes. The closest commercial product would probably be Renaissance Wax. I stopped using wax due to negative feedback from players.

Andres, Thanks for the info. Sounds just about like what I'm shooting for. Care to lay out the process here? I'd love to hear it.

Jameel I was always changing things around. I even used Qualasole a few times.

The trick was to use a very lightly-loaded brush or an FP-style pad (but not FP technique and no oil), there's a temptation to thin the stuff out a lot but you don't want to take that too far. A good quality brush and an almost drybrush technique, and if I had it to do over again I'd use an airbrush or paintgun. ;-)

Most older auds that have come thru my shop have a bare sound board. Robert did much experimentation with finnish thru the years and I remember discussing his work with egg ( either whole egg or egg white with walnut oil. ) This is a hard non penetrating finish. It is quite difficult to master.

Many of the lutes that pass my bench have a very thin clear shellac finish.

As with the violins of the 15th thru 17th centuries much of the finishing of the instrument was dependent on clear mineral grounds. Current research on lutes is being done. By finishing a raw top with horsetail rush grass after scraping as well as various volcanic abrasives helps recreate this process a bit.

We have one of Robert's bass lutes in the collection and his finish has no muting effects what so ever, neither is the wax soft.

The egg finish is nothing else but the ancient egg tempera recipe. There are countless Byzantine and Russian icons as well as Western european mediaeval paintings still in pristine condition painted with just that. The only difference is the pigment. Also on these paintings it's evident that as they age, they darken. Quite a lot, to the extent that in extreme cases the painting can't be seen any more. (I mean pristine in the sense that the painting is still there, undisturbed. You just can't see it. Not without a complicated cleaning process.)

Thanks Andres. Sound like my hvlp gun will be the way to go, especially considering the obstruction the bridge creates, would be difficult to finish around that area. And I hate brushing shellac. I was also thinking of wiping on just a coat or two of Tru oil, just to bring the color and offer a little protection. Application with a very small pad would be very easy. Stuff dries hard, right?

Stephen, I know, I know, it SHOULD be unfinished :-) But I've got to bring a little life to the cedar. The egg tempera sounds tricky.

I've never sprayed lacquer or shellac with a hvlp gun , does it work?

Can you do a thin coat. There are lots of uds out there with lacquered tops

too shiny for me.

Bare minimum I'd rub on shellac with a lent free rag.

I've only done egg but without the yoke , it yellows less this way, it's still a chore.

good luck Jameel, there is no right or wrong way when your making your own instrument.

You just work on refining your approach.

Stephen/Jameel the aforementioned lacquer spraying by Larry Brown was in an old issue of AL, if I remember right he talked about a very light dusting which was almost dry before it hit the tops.

One has to be careful with this because with the wrong stuff applied the wrong way you can actually lose some of the visual qualities of the wood in the process. I’ve seen lute tops which had a very bland dead milky matte look which I could not like.

Stay away from Tru-Oil. Good stuff, but unlike the other finishes mentioned in this thread you can't take it off with solvent, because it polymerises. You can always take off a thin shellac coat, or thin wax coat, clean the soundboard, and put on another thin coat. With Tru-Oil you'll only have the option of making it thicker and thicker.

I'm coming in a little late, but there is one more thing not yet mentioned. I've re-topped a few lutes and built a few flush fingerboard style guitars as in lute era style construction. I have some training in this area.

One finish option is very simple and appropriate for ouds and lutes. That is to burnish the grain closed with a soft cloth wrapped over a smooth soft wood barren. Then a spit coat of shellac and another burnish.

I've also waxed lute sound boards. If you do too much to them it is detrimental to the sound.

To do a cloth burnished finish you get a soft cotton cloth like a fine muslin sheet. Wrap it over a small silver dollar size round or oval shaped block of soft wood. That's the barren or support. Sand the edges of the barren smooth and soft. Before you brace the sound board, scrape then sand it to a really fine grit. then go over it with the cloth wrapped on the barren and close the grain. use moderate pressure, it will actually polish the surface of the wood closed and to a high shine.

Then after you brace a build the lute or oud, and get to the finishing stage, burnish it again carfully and apply a spit coat of shellac an then repeat the burnishing and _lightly_ wax it if you want with a high quality cabinet wax.

For people who make steel string guitars this sounds bizarre maybe, but these instruments are not supposed to have finished sound boards in the modern sense.

I also close the grain on the inside of my guitars and interior braces by polishing them with a dry cloth. Try it. Make a brace and sand it down then dry polish it with cloth and some elbow grease. It's amazing how much this closes the grain and makes softwood wood shine.

Very very interesting Stephen. Thank you! I've often daydreamed about a technique like this but thought it sounded silly! My current project has the soundboard already braced, so I'll have to skip the pre-braced burnishing. Actually I take that back. The braces are still square cross section so I think I could do the burnish with moderate pressure, carefully of course. I'm going to try this technique. Sounds great.

great topic

btw how does the egg finish look

if u dont mind me asking

Stephen,

Egg finish with out the yolk is clear and a little shinny.

The cloth does not catch because you stretch it tight over the barren. Use soft muslin cloth. You can go cross grain and in circles, whatever you want.

Jameel, you can burnish it after you've braced it, just go easy. Experiment on some scrap top wood with combination of wash coat of shellac over a burnished raw wood surface.

I can't say this is what the old lute makers did, but I can't say it's not what they did either.

Stephen ,

I've used a jade round to burnish faces. I've burnished braced faces (when I forgot to do it first) I just propped the face up on blocks and went at it. I have always used egg white, having hearnd of it very early in my oud making career. I separate the yolk (then swallow it raw just like Rocky) then I strain the white to get out the lumpy stuff, brush it on and wipe off the excess. Works for me.

Richard , when I first started using egg white I found it brittle and chippy and ended up following a suggestion to add a small bit of hardening oil. This helped. I am always careful not to add any 'whipping ' air in when i mix so it doesn't foam. However I have never removed the lumpy stuff and always had to level it out afterwards. I'm going start afresh with your suggestion. thank you.

Hello Dr.Oud!

Stephen,

I learned this from Eugene Clark, in part at least. He showed me how to burnish the back braces on the guitar with cloth after planing and sanding them. I took it further in my own experiments and realized independently that many surfaces were burnished on older instruments.

I also learned how to burnish wood from my first teacher a semi professional bow maker name Burdell Tenney. He made bows for a few famous violinists in the early days of the resurgence of baroque style playing. He was one of the first people to start making good copies of period bows. He also made bench copies of French and English master bows that I have no doubt are often sold as originals. His specialty were bench copies of Pecatte and Dodd. I can't say who or when, but certain dealers retained him to make frogs for original sticks when the frogs were missing or otherwise beyond repair. Everyone will deny it in public, but I saw it happen.

I worked in his shop for on and off for 3 years, (depending on whether or not he was pissed off at me for going surfing ) I started out working for minimum wage after school sweeping the shop and stripping furniture for his wife's antique shop. In about two weeks I was helping make the parts for cello bows. There were a lot of polishing and burnishing lessons learning to finish bow frogs and heads. It taught me to observe and learn to read how an older instrument or bow or whatever was made. Because he was such a good bench copyist, he could look at parts of bows under the magnifiers and tell what kind of tools were used and which way the tool path moved ect. He used to show me all that stuff. So now when I look at old instruments I try to understand how the tool or technique addressed the surface and why.

Years later I befriend Eugene Clark and we took to one another because I could talk about instruments from this perspective. He found it engaging enough to teach me more. We talked about concepts like taking rough lumber from the dimentioning stage to the cloth polishing stage as a progressive process in terms of what a maker in particular time period might have had available to them as material and technique.

It all means I have this really esoteric information that I don't quite know what to do with, because I'm too lazy and honest to be a forger. However, I have been called upon to replace destroyed labels in vintage guitars, but I admit to it. It's restoration work and honest if one declares it.

That's why it's easy to extrapolate from observation that instrument makers from past eras had so called tricks we can't figure out. They techniques are so dirt simple and obvious that it's deceptive. Burnishing is an effective muti-use technique that often gets overlooked these days.

you had to ask....happy now?

Dr. Oud (Richard Hankey), mentions the jade barren or burnisher and I also have used polished bone or polished boxwood etc. to burnish wood with. The cloth is good for brace tops and sides because it wraps around and conforms to the surface.

Stephen ,

I discovered by accident that my ebony fretboards looked much better and had a more even luster if I burnished them after sanding to 600 grit. I burnish them by turning the 600 grit sandpaper over and using the paper backing. It takes just a few strokes.

conservation and restoration (at times two conflicting fields)

Yes, now days it's important to discern a difference. Less so in basic day to day instrument repair, but it's something to be aware of.

I wrote my sculpture masters degree thesis about a combination of old Mr.Tenney, his methods or maxims about making objects and touched on the crossovers between sculpture and instrument making. The advisors said as a writer I'm a train wreck,( hopefully better now) but that my thesis was far more interesting than those of the grammar wonks who wrote about the same old dull takes on Duchamp or whomever that are mired down in art jargon.

Tenney was hilarious when he was working in his shop. One of his maxims, and he had hundreds most of them, mainly dirty, was "If an object can survive its own process of manufacture, then it gains the right to a life of its own." Which sort of dovetails into the idea of the object as a thing with an 'aura', if you will, that can stand on its own as something that intrigues us without the benefit of authorship. In other words, the object does not have to have a pedigree in the form of a signature from a famous artist for us to recognize it as a beautiful thing. Most great instruments fall into this catagory if you look at the outside before looking at the label.

He would teach me about this kind of stuff and not twenty minutes later become furious at some machine or part of something that would not cooperate. He'd cuss it and often fling it, or some part of it at the wall. Of course he _never_ flung anything important, but fling he did. Then I would sigh, he'd storm out of the shop and return in three minutes all composed and ask, "Christ boy! Why are you still burnishing the head of that[insert about forty five well spoken cuss words] bow when you should be going to market for ice cream?

I could have gone to law school or become an architect, but that would not have readied me for such a life of informed idleing as I lead now.

Dr. Oud.- I'm enjoying your book which I received in the mail last week from Cafe.

Thanks for the plug, I'm surprised it didn't get censored. The book is the most satisfying project I've ever done. I'm amazed it still is selling. I need to do a revision to add new things I've learned and throw out some things I don't do anymore, but there are so many more sources for oud building info now. Jameel's site is a treasure trove. He's taking the craft to new levels, using power tools to create the traditionally intricate carving and inlays and executing it all with superb craftsmanship. Did I mention he was my first book customer? I'm awfully proud to have helped launch his oud building addiction, er, career.

We don't "censor" people praising other people's work unless it's an obvious case of shilling.

Dr. Oud, your book is fantastic.

I was really exited that you put yourself into publishing it. Any addtions or revisions you make will surely be appreicated. It did everyone a great service because before you explained the oud building process there was really nothing to go on that was avaliable to the general public.

Using your book and gleaning a bit of my lute information my shop mate was able to construct a replica of an oud made in Malta in the late 19th century. So you helped out there too.

It would be great if you were to hang out on MIMF more often as your time allows.

(not shilling just fan mail)

Gee, if I knew I had a fan(s) I'd probably check it out more often. As is, I only know ouds, and they don't come up on this forum all that much, so I tend to hang out at Mike's Ouds. They have a project forum that has all kinds of oud projects from Jameel's masterpieces to some pretty scary stuff. (Now I hope that isn't as shill? huh Deb?)

Richard, are you trying to goad me into kicking you off the board or what? Stop insulting me, please.

Richard don't mean nuthin' by it Deb. He's a sweet guy. But I can see what he means. I have trouble understanding the rules 'round these parts myself sometimes. Okay, back to the topic.

I ended up doing the burnished shellac spit coat treatment (I think finish is not quite accurate a term). I sanded to 600, then burnished with my baron (everytime I read that word I think of Baron Harkonen--anyone know what I'm talking about?). Followed by two sprayed on coats of 2lb cut shellac. Now the spraying was very very light and "dry", with a very wide fan pattern and very little flow. I literally couldn't see any "wetting" of the surface at all, but I just sprayed until I could detect the color just starting to deepen. Then I stopped. This was the first coat. I waited about 20 minutes and came back and did another coat like this. After waiting about an hour, the surface was dry, but quite rough since the spray was dry. A quick going over lightly with the baron (not Harkonen)took it back to smooth. One more coat and then another burnishing and it was done. Very smooth, darkened satisfactorily to bring some life to the cedar, and just a hint (and I mean a hint) of sheen. Exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks everybody for some great info!!

You shouldn't fool with the baron Harkonen. It's dangerous. And even the Guild might be after yo, you know... Whichever guild you like, just to anticipate the question. I think you should start thinking o0f the baron Munchausen in the future, he is more benign.

By the way, I forgot, the oud looks terrific.

That looks great - like there's nothing there at all.