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Photo by Jim Craven Johathan Green works on a piano at his home on Wagner Creek Road near Talent. He makes his living restoring furniture and piano finishes. Former sailor finds niche Turns yachtsman skills to restoring furniture, pianos By BILL VARBLE When he moved to Southern Oregon, former sailor Jonathan Green traded seaboards for keyboards. Since arriving from Southern California two years ago with his wife, Beth, Green has carved out a small business niche for himself with The Finishing Touch, a piano and furniture repair and refinishing business. Before that, as a yacht skipper for 19 years in Florida and California, Green put in some time fighting the toughest enemies any wood surface can face -- the sea, the sun and the weather. At the Green's home by a creek near Talent, Green, 44, says when he first landed in Southern Oregon he felt like a beached whale. "There wasn't much going on in the yacht business," he says with a laugh. The Greens decided Jonathan could capitalize on his wood refinishing skills by refinishing pianos. "I've always loved wood," he says. Only trouble was, it turned out there weren't enough pianos to refinish in the Rogue Valley to stay busy, and Green began to think he couldn't support himself. Then Jim Church, of Medford, who operated Out of Site, a furniture repair business, decided to spend more time with the Jefferson State Jazz Orchestra. Church had been doing a lot of retouching and repair work, often for insurance companies. That made Green's piece of the pie bigger. "He's the only guy I know who was doing it full time professionally," Green says. Watching Green fill the dings in the wood under a piano keyboard with a burn-in knife and stick is a lesson in patience and attention to detail. The hot knife melts the acrylic/shellac/lacquer stick, and the substance flows into the ding. Once Green levels the area and colors it to match the original grain, you'd probably never know it was marred. "People are always amazed at the repair work," Beth Green says. "It's quite a different thing from refinishing an entire piano." Beth Green, a designer, created business cards and brochures for the business and serves as her husband's biggest booster. Green worked for famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher from 1979 to 1984. He says as a young diver, he did a lot of grunt work that was the farthest thing from glamorous, but he has a 16th-century silver Spanish coin to show for those years. After he got captain's papers from the U.S. Coast Guard, he worked as a charter boat skipper in Key West, and as the skipper of a sport-fishing boat in Naples. He later sold yachts in the Los Angeles area. "I made the mistake of thinking because I could talk boats all day, I could sell them," he says. "It was a struggle." In 1988 he bought a 32-foot Grand Banks Trawler and lived on it for four years. During that time he restored it, including all the wood surfaces. When the Greens married, they wanted to get away from Southern California -- Beth Green hated the arid region where she'd been living east of San Diego -- and decided to head north. Green says most of his business now is furniture. Refinishing a baby grand piano can run about $1,500, and a concert grand can go $2,500 and more. A piano or piece of furniture probably has to be a quality piece to be worth fixing up, Green says. "There are lots of good, old pianos out there," he says. "Some of them have been danced on and all kinds of stuff." In refinishing, Green says 90 percent of the job is in the prep work. He says the industry is changing fast, with new chemicals in wider use and old standards being used less and less and getting harder to find. "It may be that in 10 years you won't be able to buy lacquer, because of volatile organic compounds that are released into the air," he says. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA