Morning, everyone. This will be a series of posts about a thirty-day plus project, the rescue of a forlorn, unloved, and ugly violin.

First, a few admin notes. Regarding writing, I’ve got two plates in the air right now. One is the Javan War, a book I co-authored with JB that should launch soon. I worked on it while in Oz, and then John took over from there. The second is my new ISOLATED series, a new alt-history look at the Second World War where everything goes wrong because of small decisions and leadership. All of my long-time readers know that I harp on leadership a bit, because in the real world, leadership makes the difference between success and failure.

Period.

If you choose, you can read along with my hardcore fans on my Patreon site. To date, reader reactions have been good, and I’m excited to write this series.

In addition, I’ve been busy with the folks in Minnesota. Some interesting stuff happening up there.

Alright, poor Silver. I recognized its potential when the music store dumped this fiddle on me. Good wood, workmanlike construction. However, it needed the ugly 2004 Chrysler metallic paint stripped from it as a minimum, and I wasn’t sure if I could do this. A friend and mentor in Pennsylvania egged me on, so I bought some materials and started.

The above picture was the first step in the process. The violin had to be stripped to the body alone. I mostly tossed its worthless furniture, and I took off the painted, low-quality fingerboard with a butter knife. Then, I sprayed a test spot with a chemical stripper. I’ve always learned you should never do this to a violin; however, this fiddle was worthless as-is, so I had nothing to lose. This was intended as a learning exercise, and boy, was I right. See below.

Silly me. I thought the crappy paint would lift easily. No, not so much. It was very difficult to remove; also, I had to be careful with the wood beneath the horrible paint. I used an old credit card to scrape the glop. They are perfect for delicate finishes. When I scraped all that I could, I’d clean up with Scotch Brite.

Did I mention how tough the paint was? This was terrible, and it took a while before I saw the wood.

You can see the beginning here. As I suspected, this violin had real purfling (the wood inlay around the edge) and tight-grained spruce. It wasn’t junk.

This took FOREVER. Plus the stripper is caustic, of course, and the old paint JUST DIDN’T WANT TO DIE. But it had to. This became a mission. When I finished the belly, I saw the first inkling of a reward.

There was some decent, if pedestrian, wood under that crap. Wood with character. I pressed on.

The top plate, as expected, was a nightmare. Especially around the F holes! Not only did glop fall into the notches, I had to exercise extreme caution to get that sparkly crap out of the notches. Did I mention that this took forever? It did.

When the top plate was kind of OK, I started on the ribs. Wow, was that crappy. So many nooks and crannies, all loaded down with cheap hell paint. And let’s not talk about the scroll and box. Good Lord, the end of the fiddle cost me days of detail work, and yes, the scroll and box were positively slathered with that silver crap. But I managed. I reached the end of what I could do with stripper, it was time to reach for sharp metal objects.

I learned in this process that it’s not good to really scrub with Scotch Brite while the wood is soaked; it leaves rough patches. Patches I had to fix later when the fiddle dried.

Also, you have to neutralize the stripper by cleaning the entire work surface with alcohol. I did this several times before I had clean wood. See below.

This is the top plate when it was close to clean. I still had detail work to do with tools, but you could see what you’d have. Honest spruce, as opposed to minivan chic.

I’m sure you can imagine what it took to get this woebegone violin to this stage. If not, I’ll tell you. It was three weeks of intermittent scrubbing and gentle scraping. Bad news.

At the end, I had this. A 99.9 percent clean fiddle, dull from alcohol baths. It may not have been perfect, but it was good enough.

Silver was ready for the next step(s).

More follows soon.