All the little details have been attended to. Now the finish begins. This is the first wash coat of dilute shellac applied to the Honduran Rosewood uke. Wow! what a difference a little finish makes for the beauty of wood. This will be the first of two "wash" or preliminary coats of shellac.
Rosewood has a fair number of pores that need to be filled if you want a super smooth and shiny finish. I chose to use the natural pore filling technique on these ukes. You can buy stuff that you paint over the surface and then sand off to bare wood again. I think filling those pores with sawdust of rosewood has more appeal- but it ain't easy.
Heres how you get the sawdust of Honduras Mahogany that you will use to fill those pores. You want to sand the ends of the grain so that you get the finest, or smallest sawdust. You collect the sawdust and sprinkle it on the instrument as you rub shellac onto the wood. You rub the sawdust into the pores with shellac. The pores will fill, the shellac will harden and soon you have a smooth piece of wood to apply the finish to.
Here is the second coat on the top. Redwood is not a porous wood so we can just get going on applying the French Polish on the tops.
Here is the "munica".It is simply a trio of woolen pads around which you wrap a piece of tee shirt cotton held on with a rubber band. This is the tool that applies the finish all through the process.
I put the sawdust in these tiny booze bottles and punch four or five holes in the top like a salt shaker.
A little shellac, a shake of sawdust and rub it on to fill the pores,
A little shellac, a shake of sawdust and rub it on to fill the pores,
