How did you fix that?

Mangled beyond repair? Nope! So how do we go from this state to a playable, well repaired bow?

Here’s a brief series of photos about this repair project. It’s all in the process no magic required!

Previous repair

It appears that the previous repair was done with super glue and wood putty and the color touch up was done with a red sharpie marker. At this point the bow was unusable.

Dismantling the previous repair

Bathing it in acetone released the superglue and putty without damaging the wood. The color came out too. (No repair techs were harmed in the dismantling of this bow.)

Grafting a spline

After cleaning and reassembling the bow I grafted in a spline with epoxy. Because the break in the head was so low I opted to take the spline right through the tip mortis for extra strength. This was done with a circular cut.

Final results

Here is the bow after shaping the spline, putting on a new tip plate and French polishing.

Final Results

I combined a mixture of epoxy and pernambuco dust to fill in the missing piece of the bow, color matching it as closely as possible.

Final Result

I took care to preserve the original profile as much as possible. At this point the repair is complete and the bow is ready to be re-haired and played.

The frog

In case you were wondering what the other end looked like… the frog was in good condition.