Michael Szyper

Cooking pumice into varnish may lead to a significant hardening of the coating, as described in the paper. This might have an acoustical influence.

My respect for developing a fine oil varnish in those times. Making varnish nowadays with all the literature and knowledge almost feels like cheating.

Looking good is not really an absolute term. What you have made should be quite similar to the old wood 1700 varnishes. Cooking only makes sense to me if you are really looking for something you can’t buy, even overseas.

I started varnish making because I could not buy what I wanted to have: high-resin with strong color, fragile enough to make shading with alcohol easy and the „right“ fluorescence. As far as I know, you cook your own varnish, too, don’t you? Of course it will take over a hundred batches until you might get a satisfying result, but it’s IMHO still worth it.

It looks like the lime caused the issues.

Then there is the lack of leaving white scratches, which also points to a fat varnish. I find lean varnishes with rather high contents of plasticizers to show these characteristics, too.

To get a completely black resin which looks reddish/brown in a thin layer I need 50-70 minutes. Just a bit intuition needed in order to not burn the resin.

I know how to wash oil. my question was rather how you would explain that you can bind a hydrophobic substance like wax by water and wash it out. For my understanding this is not possible. By washing oil you remove phospholipids. Stickiness of varnish is rather caused by misconception of your cook than by inappropriate washing. dito

How can wax be removed by washing with water?

When making colored varnishes using cooked (and therefore extremely brittle) colophony and sandarac, i like to use up to 10% larch turpentine at the final stage of cooking. I make 80% resin (colophony/sandarac) content varnishes out of it, and the film still can be quite brittle, so the „right“ content of larch turpentine as a plasticizer also depends on the hardness of the other used resins.

Very nice, you deserve all the credit!

We'll have to discuss this in detail in Cremona, I am experimenting with buffering systems at the moment which may enhance color stability. Also I decided to develop different (but similar) wood treatments for spruce and maple each, since IMHO each wood species needs different treatments in order to get the best result.

Thank you very much! This means a lot to me, since my ground is heavily influenced by Koen Paddings primers.

It is pretty sure the calcite, since i have also primers where i exclude its formation and they appear a lot more yellowish. Davide has a rather subtle primer - some of the 2-part primers i made can leave as whitish grounds as if you would treat them with Mr. Hargrave's plaster of paris/water slurry. I like your stains, nevertheless i made the experience that intensively colored stains can clog the pores. Even if most of this impression isn't present after the first varnish coat, I still like to avoid it.

There is a reaction of the ground which causes calcite forming in the wood making the dry wood looking chalky.

Yes, I will be in Cremona from Thursday until Sunday. Of course I am going to bring you my newest stuff. And I will have a lot of questions, too :)

Edit: IMO on this instrument you can see mostly retouching and Sandarac-based overcoating.

That is pretty much the same what you can see in “modern” Uv samples. Unfortunately I don’t know the methodology behind excluding wood stain, but there is plenty of evidence for the use of it.

Hi Davide, thank you so much, it is such an honor! The uv fluorescence of this ground is actually black and matches the fluorescence images of B/G pretty good. I still use this ground, but I made some variations of this concoction in order to get different hues (some with a darker, greenish hue, some redder - in order to be able to get closer in copying) I hope to see you in Cremona! If you need more, I can bring you some of the other grounds. I am not sure wether the authors had also access to microscopic sagittal uv pics. This method is excellent to properly investigate the layers. Since lot of the base varnish soaked into the wood, it may be difficult to discern between it and a stain layer without looking at shavings. What I like about bg is, that you can drive your own conclusions since there is so much data/material to work with. I don’t like to rely on “expert claims” only.

What a wonderful piece of art! Phenomenal texture…

Beautiful photo, maestro! Actually there are some stains which leave the medullary rays bright. I fully agree about chemical treatments using nitrites and lyes - they darken the rays considerably. I want my wood primer to have little (=no) fluorescence, as it can be seen in the Brandmair/Greiner uv shots.

D Limonene is a very potent diluent, unlike Benzene free mineral spirits and is by far the least hazardous oil varnish thinner. It leaves residues, may dissolve partially dried varnish layers and can cause severe crackeling in lean varnishes if spread in too thick layers. As long as it works with your varnish, due to health aspects I would strongly recommend the use of limonene.

As far as I remember the measurements don’t fit the outline of the Montagnana’s sleeping beauty poster. I would recommend to check the outline before making a mould.

Thank you guys! Yes, it is a Conte vitale inspired model. The picture saturation after MN upload is for some reason a lot more intense. The real picture and instrument isn’t quite that red.

My latest viola