An ugly white spot where the finish chipped off.

Where did the white spot go?

Here's a little closer view, can you see the repair?

Closer still. Now can you see it? It is in the very center of the photo. Not a miracle, but pretty good.

Can you find where this sample was repaired? If we hadn't suggested you look for a repair, we doubt you would have suspected there had been a repair. Even with that suggestion, we guess that many will not see any evidence of a repair. That is the way most repairs go. Pass your mouse over the space below the sample and you will see the original damage. Now that you know where it was, it is not so hard to see the repair.

This matching set serves as a before and after of a finish repair we did to this scuffed, dented and gouged surface. No, the bottom table is not the after!

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Below are two chairs in a set that both had been broken in the same place. These pictures are after our work was completed. Can you find our repairs? We doubt you will. This is the usual result after repair. If you don't know where to look, you can't find the repair. We actually want you to notice our repair work so we will give you a clue in the pictures to the right.

Surely you see the repairs now! You are looking closely at the exact area where the posts were broken in two. We were actually not the first ones to try to repair these breaks. The wood plug you see in the upper picture covers a screw which holds the seat. The extra plug on the lower chair is actually a dowel someone else had inserted through the line of the break to try, unsuccessfully, to hold the chair post together.

Pass you mouse over the spaces directly below to see the broken areas after we had glued them together with an oak spline to give new and added strength. You should also be able to see the break line below the dowel in the top picture and a break line through the dowel and above the dowel in the lower picture.

Pass your mouse over the spaces directly below to see a close up of our touch up to the spline repair. It is easy to see our repair now--close up and knowing where to look! If it had been worth it to the customer to spend more, we could have made the outline of the spline less visible.

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You will very rarely see an acoustic musical instrument in our shop but the damage that needed repairing on this guitar was something we felt comfortable with. We are not sure what caused this damage, but we were sure we could make it look better.

We do this with trepidation, but we now divulge some trade secrets. The first step in touch-up is to create a background approximating the lightest surrounding color. Here we did this with the light orange colored pigment mellowed with some straight white. These are mixed in shellac and brushed on.

After all the brush work was done, we used some aerosol toners to blend the repaired area with the surrounding area. We know you can still make out where we worked, but we are equally sure that if you had only this picture to look at, you would not have guessed where it had been repaired.

The next step is to add the darker contrasting grain lines. We chose a couple additional colors of pigment to add to our shellac mixture and applied those with a very fine artist's brush. Each stage in touch-up must be sealed in place. We used an aerosol lacquer sealer to do this.

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Here is another example of a before and after of a damaged finish, this time on a table top. Again, powdered pigments of the appropriate colors liquified in shellac applied with artist brushes, sealed with an aerosol lacquer sealer. A little experience is thrown in too!

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Now that you have seen what we have done for others, what can we do for you? CONTACTING AND FINDING US