Keep Finish From Peeling During Show

iamarobotman

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The cherry red paint on my 1967 Starfire IV also peeled away everywhere. When you hold it your shirt is full of little red flakes after playing. My solution was that I disassembled the guitar, carefully cleaned the guitar (just the dirt with some naphta, and definitely no polish as new lacquer will not stick to furniture polish or oil or silicone) and gave it to a luthier who overspayed it very thin with fresh clear nitrocellulose lacquer. Now some will cry to do this to a vintage guitar, but we are not talking a $250k Les Paul here and after all, nitrocellulose lacquer has the nice properties that it melts itself into the old lacquer and heals the demage. So now it has a protected finish again and it's ready for another 30 years or so. The whole process takes some days or even weeks depending on the thickness of the new finish as the oversprayed finish needs to dry again.
Ralf

My buddy is a head luthier at Gruhn, so this might be the ticket to keep it safe. I'm never ever going to sell it, so I'd rather it be played and functional with a light overspray like you said.
 

Nuuska

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The guitar of course! I can watch videos of Phil Collen of Def Leppard if I want to see a topless player...

walrus


Deleted - got exited remembering early childhood.
 
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SFIV1967

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Anyone ever use Gibson Pump Polish? Thinking of trying it.
In my opinion, any polish on bare wood will make the wood just look much darker (saturated), so you will see every crack in the finish even more! And the polish will seep under the finish in my opinion. If you want to overspray later on that would be not a good idea at all as the fresh NC lacquer would not melt and bond with the old flaked finish. Just my opinion.
Ralf
 

iamarobotman

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In my opinion, any polish on bare wood will make the wood just look much darker (saturated), so you will see every crack in the finish even more! And the polish will seep under the finish in my opinion. If you want to overspray later on that would be not a good idea at all as the fresh NC lacquer would not melt and bond with the old flaked finish. Just my opinion.
Ralf

Gotcha! Or I just rock it like Willie's Trigger. Who cares about finish or not I reckon!?
 

kakerlak

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So, I've seen more than a few '60s-'70s Guilds where the finish seems to lift up in little bubbles/spots and then flake away. It's not the typical issue where worn-off areas chip away at their edges (that can be arrested by wicking some super glue carefully into the lifting edges of the finish. This is some sort of weird delamination issue and I'm not really sure how you'd stop it, to be honest. I wouldn't be surprised if it would continue to do this even after being oversprayed with new lacquer, though that might make the overall finish harder/thicker such that it was less prone to bubbling up like that.
 

Nuuska

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Hello

First I say that I personally know NOTHING about what comes next - all info comes from my late friend, who was violin repairman - a good fellow.

He once made me a mixture called "pulituuri" - his recipe had 6 parts in it - water - spirit - shellac - wax - plus - plus.

I used it on some of my old furniture - hard rubbing in with plenty of it - stinking to high heaven.

It did the trick on parts where it was not too late - on parts that should have been treated decades ago and original surface was gone, it was naturally too late.

The idea - according to him - was that this mixture softened the original coating a bit and the new and old melted together to continue the original work.

All hairline cracks disappeared and them furnitures still look good. Except for spots where it was already too late.


I suppose we have some members in this group who know this procedure and can explain it better.
 

adorshki

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Hello

First I say that I personally know NOTHING about what comes next - all info comes from my late friend, who was violin repairman - a good fellow.

He once made me a mixture called "pulituuri" - his recipe had 6 parts in it - water - spirit - shellac - wax - plus - plus.

I used it on some of my old furniture - hard rubbing in with plenty of it - stinking to high heaven.

It did the trick on parts where it was not too late - on parts that should have been treated decades ago and original surface was gone, it was naturally too late.

The idea - according to him - was that this mixture softened the original coating a bit and the new and old melted together to continue the original work.

All hairline cracks disappeared and them furnitures still look good. Except for spots where it was already too late.


I suppose we have some members in this group who know this procedure and can explain it better.

You're describing a form of "French Polishing", which is based on shellac and was common before the advent of NCL finishing.
It's the "Spirit" or high-proof wood alcohol in the mix which "softens" the existing finish and re-opens the ability for the new finish to blend with the old.
NCL behaves similarly but the solvents are primarily acetone based instead of alcohol based.
For Robotman's purposes NCL should be applied over NCL to achieve a melding of the old vs new finish, I don't think shellac over nitro will yield satisfactory results.
Ideally the newly softened old finish should bond to the wood again, unless something else is inhibiting the bond, perhaps something peculiar to the production process that is causing the high rate of finish separation Kakerlak describes.
Otherwise one would suspect that there was some flaw in the finish formula that causes the bubbling and lifting off.
Or it may have just been one of the accepted limitations of the particular NCL formula used at the time, (limited lifespan), as NCL itself has evolved over the years and there are numerous variations of the formulae.
Note one of our member's comments on French Polished shellac vs NCL in post #17 of this thread:
http://www.letstalkguild.com/ltg/showthread.php?188931-Finishes/page4&highlight=finishes
 
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