At 17:12 -0400 14/4/08, Dean May wrote: >The Hallet Davis I have recently posted pictures of has a handgrained >rosewood finish and I am going to refinish it. Has anyone ever done a >handgrained rosewood finish? Is it economically feasible? If not, I plan on >just doing it in a walnut finish. From a French-polisher's point of view rosewood is about the easiest to fake and I quite often fake small areas using a ground of earth colours mixed with rose pink and adding the black figure with gas black on a small well-oiled fad. I can give you more details if you are a french-polisher but I would not know how to get a realistic rosewood figure except by using traditional french-polishing techniques. I have republished at <http://pianomaker.co.uk/technical/polishing/> a fine article from about 1910 about French polishing and I have another article from the same volume on graining, but unfortunately this concerns graining with oil paint, and the polishing article, I think, does not go into the question of faking, as we call it. The man who taught me years ago was a very good faker. JD
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