Welcome to the home of the Ferrari double bass, owned, customized and played by Mike Berry from Sydney Australia.

Painting my bass was quite an involved project and if anyone else wishes to undertake such a task, this site might offer some good advice as to how to do it and shows step by step all the stages from preparation through to completion of the project.

The paint I used was Candy Apple Red which was used on some fender guitars back in the fifties. It has two parts, a silvery base coat with translucent red over the top to give the sparkle finish.

The good thing is that the paint is acryllic and so was the original finish on the bass so there was no need to completely strip the instrument back to bare wood. In fact, I was adviced not to and instead just lightly sand the whole thing prior to painting hence not risking any damage to the wood.

Then it's a case of taking a deep breath (scary thing to do taking sandpaper to your precious bass!) and start lightly sanding with fine paper making sure to get right into all the edges and fiddly bits. I then got some putty and filled all the dents and scratches too.

The next thing to do was to apply a couple of thin coats of primer, I used grey acryllic paint straight out of aerosol cans which I got from the auto parts store.

Unfortunately there's no short cuts to doing this job so after applying the second coat of primer I sanded it back again with very fine grade paper until I was completely satisfied that it was perfectly smooth all over.

There's no doubt, this project involved more sanding and later on cutting and polishing than you could ever imagine was possible!!!

I briefly mentioned earlier that the paint I used came in two parts. It consists of a silvery metallic base coat which contains millions of little metal particles, when you spray it's like it's snowing silver.

Because the paint came in tins, undiluted, I had to mix it with thinners and hire a spray gun and air compressor to apply it. Seeing as I hadn't used this type of equipment before I had to experiment a bit with the mixture and pressure settings etc. I would recommend practicing on a big piece of wood or something until you are completely sure you have got it sussed out.

I was surprised how easily it went on and it dries very quickly so you can pretty much do a coat and then by the time you've refilled the spray gun, get straight on with the next. I did three coats of the silver base to make sure that I had it well covered and the great thing about this stage is that you don't need to do any sanding.

Once the silver base coat was finished I had to really clean up the place, that stuff gets everywhere!!! Obviously cleaning out the spray gun with thinners properly too is very important before moving on to the next stage.

When it was completely dry I got some 1/8" silver striping from the auto parts store and stuck it around the edge front and back about 1/4" in. It's self adhesive and thin enough to appear quite smooth when you get a few coats of laquer over it.

One more thing to do before getting onto laquering was to get some gloss black paint and a small brush to paint the inside edges of the f-holes and those two little strips of wood each side of where the neck joins the body.

The last stage was to apply a few coats of laquer, again I used cans of aerosol clear laquer from the auto parts store.

This is the most time consuming stage out of the whole project because you have to let each coat thoroughly dry and then sand it back with very fine sandpaper before applying the next.

Finally I got some auto polish which in itself is very slightly abrasive and with a whole lot more elbow grease managed to end up with a finish as smooth and shiny as a piece of glass.