Finishing, unfinished

Not much visible progress. Doing the French polish thing.

Everything looks better with proper lighting.

It looks a lot better in photos than in person. It’s only shiny if you get the light hitting it just right.

That headstock just has one coat of shellac on it after the pore fill, so it’s not shiny yet.

Cloudy bits of pore fill goop

Those cloudy spots are what I’m trying to eliminate. There were more of them. It’s sludge left over from the pore fill; a mixture of sawdust, shellac, and a bit of pumice. Alcohol will strip the finish off all the way to bare wood, and then you have to rebuild the shellac. Shellac just covers it up more. So you have to get just enough shellac to get it to dissolve, and then polish it out.

I think that’s what’s happening, anyhow. I just keep going until ‘too tired’ meets ‘looks good enough’, at which point I stop. And I’m getting a tremor in my right elbow.

Then there’s this discolored patch of maple right near the headstock where I’ll see it all the time. Don’t know what it is, or how to fix it, but it’s underneath the finish so it’s staying like that.

Freckles? Birthmark? Plague? Who knows.