70’s guild touch up

[Ian Davlin The Looth Group]

Pretty standard stuff. What is happening is just the additive property of the color with dyes. There is color on the edge and where you are adding color to make up for a color deficiency, it’s overlapping and darkening the area that already has color.

Couple things, you can either try harder not to overlap, or scrape back the color.
I often find myself doing this. One key element of this is that as soon as you scrape, you will lower the sheen and it will be impossible to get a good read on what the color is doing. You can normalize the sheen by wiping naptha over it.

Also, you lacquer need to be hard to do this. Scraping soft lacquer will make you sad.

[Corey Williams Noank Guitar Repair]

Thanks Ian! I’ll give this a shot and hopefully get this looking better

[Al Pachter Al’s Guitar Workshop]

Hey Corey, in addition to what Ian has said, I’ll add that much of this type of repair depends on the nature of the job. If this repair is a practice effort on your part, and the amount of time invested is less important than the learning involved, then keep going to see how much better you can get it. If this is a customer job then you can use my cosmetic repair info sheet as a guide for yourself. In that case, try your best not to go over your contracted hours, knowing that you’ve already explained to the customer that it’s not going to be perfect. Always remember that the number one goal is to stay in business and none of us can do that if we chop our hourly fee in half or worse. Many shops don’t do cosmetic work because it takes too long, but often it takes too long because the looth is chasing perfection. Yes, there are looths who can get it very close to perfect. It’s ok that yours isn’t perfect and fwiw I’ve had many happy customers from jobs that yielded identical results to what you have so far.

[Corey Williams Noank Guitar Repair]

Hey Al! This is a guitar I traded for a while back to practice on so I have no time constraint or expectations. I do not think I’m ready to take something on like this for customers yet!

I can see getting lost in trying to improve something like this and losing money. Thanks for the advice.

Do you ever have trouble dealing with expectations with customers and cosmetic work?

[Al Pachter Al’s Guitar Workshop]

Hey Corey,

I’ve learned over the years that it’s criticallly important to accurately describe the outcome of the repair. Before my cosmetic info sheet, my satisfaction rate was very high. Since I started using that sheet, it’s even higher. And my work is nowhere near as good as our top shelf guys in The Looth Group. So it can be done!