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Real egg whites from an egg you just cracked, or are we talking powdered egg whites?


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Real egg whites, just crack the egg and separate it.
This is one of techniques that's hundreds of years old that we keep trying to improve upon with modern chemicals, but make little progress with IMO.

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Jim Watts
http://jameswattsguitars.com

I would spend the rest of my days trying to re-create that magic! Sounds like the holy grail to me.
Why didn't you stick with that method?
I have a pretty strong first born I could bring to the negotiating table if it's a teachable technique.

David, thanks for the offer, but my first born already eats too much!

Actually, it's much like Jim's egg white technique I guess. I just lay down 2-3 good shellac passes. Let those dry a few minutes. Have your pumice on a sheet of paper and spread it out, shaking the sheet. Then, using a muneca, just bite off a bit of the pumice, hit that with a few drops of Methyl Hydrate (or whatever solvent you're using for the shellac) and just work it into the surface using circular motions, changing directions as if you were French polishing. Let that dry. Lightly sand off excess with 320 or so. You'll quickly get the feel for how much pumice to use and how far you can stretch it. The best part is that if you add too much, just add solvent and spread it out, or just sand it off. I like that kind of buffer, where you can screw up solid, and just clean up your mess in 2 minutes and it's as if it never happened! Ha!

I was just expressing interest in the egg whites method because I'm always looking for an easier way, lazy bum that I am.

I think my favorite aspect of the whole pumice fill is the look. It's hard to beat the color match as you're using the very same wood in your slurry. It dries hard and doesn't shrink back.

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I'd like to be able to prove, just for once, that money wouldn't make me happy...

Thanks for the description Alain.
It sounds like standard methods as described in so many places. No secret.
I pumice filled two instruments awhile back but never felt like I had the practice under control. There were periods it was happening and I would celebrate, (I'm doing it! I'm doing it!) followed by periods of frustration trying to recreate the good times.

I always keep an eye out for a secret or a description than will inspire me to give it another go.
I do believe it can be a relatively fast and effective method if mastered.

I don't have much for you with kids eating you out of house and home. I think you'd have to restrict their physical activity somehow.

What is a "Muncea"? I'm sure the Google description isn't what you are referring to.

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Brad Hall
Mystic Dawg Guitars

The "doll" definition is not totally incorrect. The muneca is, normally, a wad of wool tied or twisted in a cotton or linen piece of cloth, sort of like a doll's head, which is then used in French polishing to apply the material. I have also seen the term fad, or pad used to describe the muneca.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

FWIW old timers called them a rubber, because you rub the shellac on with it. Today people can't seem to use that term without sniggering, hence the adoption of the Spanish word for the same thing. When I first started learning how to do it, tampon was the favored term, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside for the same reason.

Really? Well, tampon means the same in Spanish. Here in Portugal we call it the boneca, same as Spanish muneca. If the lore I've heard is right, French polish is an English technique with a French name and applied with a Spanish doll - is it just me that finds this amusing? Regarding pummice, I'm on the same boat, sometimes it feels like I'm getting the hang of it just to mess things up further down the road. I also found it shrank in the pores after a few days and really big pores were impossible to fill completely.

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member of the guild of professional dilettantes

Me too, (amusing) - very EU....

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

a couple of months ago, there was an article in Fine Woodworking about filling pores. The author warned that the problem noted in the OP could happen if the solvent wasn't allowed to evaporate.