Flea Jazz checked... <WARNING RELIC CONTENT>

[Stub Mandrel]

I've been looking for them for ages, and while packing up my workshop contents a few days ago I finally found some cans of pipe freezer spray. These are just compressed air, so no nasty solvents.

I've already made some tweaks to the relicing on my Flea bass to make it a bit more natural looking, essentially carefully blending some of the more obviously artificial marks together to get rid of patterns and without greatly increasing the amount of relicing.

Armed with a precision heat gun (actually a temperature controlled solder rework gun) set to 300C and the freezer spray I had a go at checking the nitro finish. The main challenge was spotting any missed bits, not helped by the fact that applying hot air makes the pattern disappear!

I brought out the pattern in two ways - I attacked it with the dirty brush I use to clean machine tools, and I wiped over dark oak stain and then wiped it off again. This has also brouht out some opf teh otehr relicing a bit and dulled a few spots where my 'tuning' revealed bare wood.

I'm happy with the result by I know many people won't, it's such a 'marmite' topic. All I can say is since getting this bass it's the one I always come back to and for the next nine days it's the only one (of ten) I have with me 🙂

 

 

[skankdelvar]

That looks a lot more convincing.

3 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

I attacked it with the dirty brush I use to clean machine tools, and I wiped over dark oak stain and then wiped it off again. This has also brouht out some opf teh otehr relicing a bit and dulled a few spots where my 'tuning' revealed bare wood.

↑ Very much this ↑   There's nothing more irritating than faked-up wear around pristine wood.

Well, obviously, there are things that are more irritating, like spilling a mug of freshly made tea, but that's outwith the parameters of the debate.