Varnish restoration on a fine mandolin.

Often, people call the shop asking if I work on guitars/mandolins/banjos/dulcimers/bass/harmonicas (just kidding on the harmonicas). Because fretted instruments are so different in construction and parameters for set-up, I decline—I simply don’t have the training to successfully work on these projects. Every now and then, however, someone asks me to do varnish restoration on a fine instrument, and this is something that I love doing. I still leave all the set-up work to the luthiers who specialize in the instrument in question, but varnish magic is one of my favorite things to help with.

This mandolin was made by Michael Lewis from Grass Valley, California. A fantastic and much-loved mandolin player and tenor singer of Bluegrass music named Pete Siegfried owned and played this mandolin until he passed it on to my client, Thomas Shewmake from the band One Button Suit. Thomas inherited the instrument as his mentor Pete was in decline of health, and Tom wanted to both honor his mentor by having the instrument put back into beauty after some varnish damage, and also preserve the patterns of wear from Pete’s playing that memorializes all the music that his mentor made with this mandolin. This is an interesting varnish restoration challenge—preserve the patterns of wear, the touch of the hand that played it, while repairing a few areas that were more-objectively “damaged.” I love this kind of project—I enjoy the nuance and attention to detail, and I love that instruments carry their own stories, have their own messages to convey.

Below is a “before” picture. You can see the light areas on the top of the mandolin where Pete touched the varnish while he played. There is, however, one area where accidentally a few pieces of wood were completely chipped out, leaving damage all the way down to and into the wood. These areas were to be restored, while the patterns of wear from being lovingly-played would be preserved.

Next we have an “after” picture.

Additionally, there was damage to the varnish on the ribs of the mandolin. At some point there was an accident when someone cleaned the instrument but mistakenly also REMOVED the all the varnish on the shoulder of the mandolin. I unfortunately didn’t take a “before” photo of the varnish damage to the shoulder, but just imagine no varnish at all, down to bare wood, from half-way between the point of the rib up the entire side of the heel of the neck. Here’s how it looked after I restored the varnish.

Tom wrote me after taking the mandolin home, and spending some time with it after the varnish work.

“I strung up the mandolin. It plays strong and full…like it always has. Making it appear less tired was really important to me as the care taker. I have a lot of nice instruments, but this one is priceless. I couldn’t have asked for a better restoration of this instrument. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”