Roy I am very familiar with wood pickling techniques, but I am curious.
Pickling is a technique (usually) used to make new wood look like wood that has been refinished by someone who couldn't get all the old paint or stain residue from the original wood finish. I would think that what you would want to do, if you are restoring an instrument to it's full glory, is to use modern refinishing techniques to replicate the original finish, not try to make it all 'old and used up' looking. Aesthetics notwithstanding, pickling refers to a thinner-than-standard coat of a material that is applied and then wiped off, allowing material to remain in the cracks, crevisas, and end-grain areas. This is then 'finished' with a color, stain, paint, or clear coat. You can use most any finish for pickling, as long as it is thinned at least 25% more than the standard application viscosity. You will have to experiment with the time you leave a material on the surface before wiping. Oils work better than most water-based finishes, because they don't raise the grain and you don't have to sand the piece after you pickle with an oil. One of the most traditional picklings is to take a handful of galvanized roofing nails and put them in a jar with while distilled vinegar for a few days. The galvanizing will dissolve and suspend, and when applied to wood will give the sun-bleached, light silver-gray color that most lighter woods take on after time. Then you finish it with translucent stain, a wash of paint, or clear. Again, restoring an instrument to a used state seems to me the same as doing a new calligraphed scroll on antique colored parchment paper instead of natural bright white parchment - most of the fine works in the past were done to be nice and clean and bright and new looking, Just because it is 100. 200. 400 or more years old doesn't mean that a master craftsman who built a thing didn't try to find the brightest and clearest colored finishes, whitest paper and brightest fabric, most precise detail tools and finishing impliments. It doesn't mean that new pieces from the 1800's workshops or even hundreds of years earlier were not every bit as nice and clean and new and shiny and smooth as what we can get now - in fact many times the pieces were nicer. It doesn't do an honor to the original builder to refurb something to a state that isn't what that builder intended. I don't know the specifics, but pickling to me always screams 'intentional antique', it takes a master to make it look 'real'. It is much easier to make something look new, in my opinion. But to answer your question - the word can and does mean 'stain or paint' mixed and applied as a pickling and not a full treatment. Chris Nogy *********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 11/17/2006 at 2:16 AM Roy Trotter wrote: >Well , eveything that I got on gmail I have got on yahoo, but I >haven't got much on either, so I'm "trial ballooning" again. >Except I have a question, and it is predictibly a MAKING question., >actually a pickling question. >(If you are Helmut Gotchsky (HG) or have his book, I'm on page 50 "Das >Beizen" ) This gets translated ( also in the dictionary) as "The >Pickling". So I went to the hardware store looking for Pickling, she ( >this wasn't "Julie -in -the -cage" she saw me coming and went off to >measure something.) showed it to me and said it was about the same as >Whitewash . SO; I am wondering if "Beizen" can also mean "Stain" ( >some kind of generic word) or something else entirely different. > A very light coat of whitewash might easily become transparent under >a few coats of shellac, but I'm not willing to find out that way. >The back and sides are pretty thin already and I thought it would be >cheaper to ask somebody first. Fact? Opinions? Anyone... >As far as I can tell, it's been real quiet on the hurdy Gurdy front, >so here's your chance to pipe up. > >Oh yes, indeed, if I go that route I will test it on a board ( plenty >of those lying around) but it would still be cheaper to ask questions >first. > >Thanks, Roy
