Steaming out dents.

[Maude]

Last week at rehearsal my doublebass fell over, a bit of a story as to how it fell but that's besides the point. 

It fell face down with the G string touching down first on the rounded edge of an old granite step making a mess of the string and putting about a inch long depression into the fingerboard, about the same depth as the string. It also knocked the bridge across about an inch an chipped the upper bout edge a little. 

The bridge is easily sorted and I'm not too worried about the chips, a touch of wax will sort them, but the big dent in the fingerboard right under the G string would certainly hamper playing, and we've got a wedding to play in two weeks, so I was a little anxious. 

I haven't got any pictures of the fingerboard but this is the string so you can imagine the damage to the fingerboard, it didn't scrape, just a direct impact. 

Anyway the point of this post is that I thought I'd try steaming it out, not knowing if it would work at all with such a sharp dent and it being in very hard ebony. I've never done it before but wetting the dent with warm water and then placing the edge of some wet folded kitchen towel on the dent and working a hot soldering iron slowly over it has worked wonders. It took about half an hour of repeatedly wetting, steaming and cooling but the dent has come out completely. A little rub afterwards with some 2000 grit paper wetted with lemon oil has made the repair completely invisible and to be perfectly honest I'm quite pleased with myself. 

If you've got any such dents in wood I'd thoroughly recommend giving it a go as it worked a lot better than I though it would and was very easy. 

🙂

[Deedee]

Nice work, glad you got it sorted.

I've only tried this method once and that was on the back of an oiled maple neck. Only a small dent, but as you've described quite a sharp one and annoyingly right where you'd feel it with your thumb when fretting. I used the corner of a damp teatowel and an iron and it worked a treat.