Hello there, my fellow artisans and handcrafts enthusiasts!

Welcome back to the start of a new project. This one might get interrupted towards the middle since there are some new things to show about tools and other gadgets. This Venezuelan Cuatro came to my hands in a combo with the mandolin that needed a bridge. This one needed a new finish.

Assessing

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The first order of business was talking to the owner about the idea he had. You see, this person wanted just to add some lacquer over the autograph on the instrument. I will start by addressing the fact that such a thing is as worthy as any autograph you could get in your hands, forehead, breasts and so on. You get the idea. It will fade away since it is something that is in contact with many other elements. Besides, just adding a new finish over the older one looks really bad. The only way of doing it a having good results is to remove the older finish and add a new one.

Also, there are some areas to fix. Some damaged parts around the strum guard, sound board, fretboard. All these needs a patch up. And that means also taking away that autograph from the instrument. More on that subject on a later entry.

Once the assessment has been done, it is time remove the strings and take off the tuners so we can start the long grinds of removing the old finish.

Scraping and Sanding

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The task of removing the finish takes more than one day when done by hand. The general idea is to take one area and work on that until the whole lacquer and finish is off it. We can move from the smaller areas like the head stock and the back of it, going through the neck onto the back and then the sides. The latter are the most annoying part since the curve makes it difficult to the scraper and we actually need to use sandpaper for most of it.

Doing this we can start making any kind of problems that will need to be fixed with sandpaper later on. Also, we are not addressing the sound board at once since it is the most difficult part at the moment since it had the bridge attached to it. So, working around it will be a pain.

It most be pretty obvious that the instrument had some sort of ink on its finish that made it look a bit orange. This is something we won't replicate since the natural colors of its wood are amazing.

More scraping and sanding

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Now we get to the front of the instrument. We start by removing the finish from the strum guard since this is the easiest part. The grind of the sound board it something that is missing from photos since it takes a really long time and requires a ton of focus to achieve properly. And as you can see the sides are also clean now after some heavy sanding.

You can see a final glimpse at the autograph on the sound board before it gets removed from the instrument. Don't worry there is a nice story about it. I could contact the musician that signed this and get him to signed it again when he comes back to the country this year. I still don't like the idea of having these details on instruments, but the thing isn't mine and this is the best I could do.

There's still a lot of work to be done to complete this project. Make sure to follow it up. Thanks for reading. See you next time!