Thread: Classic Italin Violin Varnish, G.L. Baese

That looks interesting,
Will wait for your report to hit my desk.
But ,have slipped it into my amazon wish list.

Cheers Matt


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Very interesting. I am interested in what you find.

With the government regulations killing all the good short oil varnishes in the USA - I did some reading about perhaps making my own... And the violin guys are heavily invested in this sort of thing.

Little did I know that the vast majority of these take months to prepare and require a lot of UV to cure.. Most of those guys use UV booths to avoid weeks of sticky instruments picking up dust.

Thats fine id you have a good UV booth.. Hard for a hobby person like me who mostly builds at night.

I'm about half-way through this book and several interesting and new-to-me bits of information are given.

1) The purity and preparation of oils are the focus of considerable effort. Oils, presumably in the raw state, were washed with water several times in a primitive type of separatory funnel to remove visible contaminants.

2) Oils were further processed prior to use by extended exposure to sunlight. Such exposure served to reduce the volume of the washed oil, probably by evaporation of residual wash water and by driving off low molecular weight components. Solar reduction also eliminated the tendency of oils to become rancid.

3) Prepared varnishes were aged to produce superior finishes.

4) Reference is made to burnishing of wood prior to varnishing using agate or a pigs tooth.

5) The ratio of resin to oil ranged between 1:2 and 1:3.