Aging/Relic a Poly Urethane Fender Telecaster Guitar

we're in the middle of the polar vortex here in Chicago and there's no better time to age a guitar then when you get wild swings in humidity and in temperature I've got this American Standard Telecaster 2015 it's a poly finish won't age like Nitro but I can get it pretty close and get that nice vintage worn relic look normally I don't show some of the relic in that I do on this channel it's sort of controversial but I've been doing a couple more relics here and there and wanted to show you what I've done doing some relics on San Paolo yet I did a black key strat many years ago and this looks terrible but I wanted to play around with this and just see what it looked like I ended up burning off a lot of the finish and if you see me on that Paul Reed Smith restore I'm doing it takes forever to do this so instead of actually burning off and sanding back as much as I did in this one I'm gonna do a little bit on metalli bring in some shoe polish and get this to that nice vintage look won't be as perfect and as beautiful as nitro but we can get it close and what we'll do is we'll use some sandpaper and lighten up dull this up a little bit the first thing we're gonna do is where I take this apart bring it inside and outside over a couple hours will do is heat up the finish take it back outside heat it up again take it back outside we'll probably do that through three or four cycles try and get the finish and what to expand and contract I won't do that with the neck but I'll definitely do that with the body so first things first here we gotta take off all the hardware take off the neck and get this prepped to go outside here okay I will take off the strings here we'll save them for use later we'll pull off that neck we'll just essentially unscrew everything here pull that bridge off save the strings I'll cut the wires for the control cavity on one of the yellows there's two yellows I'll put a piece of blue tape on it to market for later and then I've got sort of a ping hammer that I'm just gonna start whacking the body with aged it a little bit on the back and the front side here I sprayed it with water just to see it what it looks like and then I'll take that same tool from before and begin to drag it on the outside edge of the body we'll just do this slowly and what we're doing here is compressing the wood doing that will chip the paint overtime here so play around push this down a couple of times putting pretty decent amount of pressure on it and as I'm doing this as I watch the video through and I'm editing it later probably should have gone all that high towards the upper horn a little unnatural wearing to some degree should have just sort of focused on that lower horn here to the base of the body but lessons learned well fast-forward and you can see as I push down I get the chipping on the paint nitro would crack kind of immediately here I've got to go back and forth with a decent amount of pressure on this poly body so do this on the back in the front of that corner that's where you get a lot of natural wear and through this process you want to do things staged differently you don't want to try all one thing at one time and then move on to another piece you want to do this over time do different sort of ageing techniques dings and then we'll move this to the outside so it's negative 20 what I was doing is I turn on the fire I put it next to the fire out in the snow next to the fire on the snow I did this for about eight times and I brought this into the basement and I take my heat gun and begin heat this up one more time it's not gonna crack the same way nitro is so nitro you get those sort of fine lines across the whole body but I wanted to do was try and get some sort of cracking and I get a little bit of that so I'll take that ping hammer and rub it back and forth and once I heated up the finish here I took that screwdriver and I at the back of the body a little bit and you can see that here as I slowed us down as I turn it you can see that aging cracks from pushing down on the heated up finish I thought that was probably one of the better ways of doing this didn't heat this up on the front and I probably should have I really like the way this looked in the back you get that indent with the heated up poly I think that's probably the most effective way of getting some lines into it one of the keys I want to show you guys is as you're doing this you're taking those lines as the wear of the guitar from playing it you don't want to go back and forth the way you wouldn't be playing it so again we're just taking the screwdriver and pinging the body off here and there and this is where some of the fun starts I've got two wire brushes and I'm just gonna start rubbing off that poly finish with the wire brush so this is an old rusty aggressive brush and we're just pushing this back and forth against the body and then right next to it is more of a fine wire brush from Home Depot and this is getting that same wear pattern as you would play back and forth and it'll begin to just brush off that finish what I really want to do is dull out that finish that yellow is just too bright it's never going to age so by using the wire brush I'm getting those sort of fine line scuffs that you wouldn't get if you just went with sandpaper so we'll rub a little bit of water on here and now I've got open grit 600 and we're gonna turn this on and we're just gonna rub this back and forth across the top in the back this is pulling off some of those scratches slightly and like I was saying before you want to use a couple different sort of processes to Aegeus at different times if you do one thing consistently it's not going to look natural so we'll go back and forth with the sandpaper on the front in the back and this is pulling off some of that Sheen that bright scene from the poly we're gonna test a little bit of the shoe polish now and just see what it looks like see where the color sitting in what grooves its filling in so trying the brown the brown didn't work as well as the black you'll see that coming up later on but it definitely does darken up the finish it dulls it up a little bit more as well so you can see already I've got that sort of Sheen gone and if you rub it then with the wire brush you can sort of begin to pull it off which is exactly what I want to do as I'm playing around with this so that was just a little test section and we'll speed this up again and start using the different brushes to try and wear it out in a couple of spots that you would get from either an arm or by Bako I then bring a 40-pound weed over and I sort of rub that off the top and on the back here what that does it gives me sort of a larger flat spot a little bit different grooving so I'll rub that on the top move it on the back I just help sort of scuff it up a little bit more and get you sort of a different wear pattern the key is to get multiple wear patterns from different tools so it looks overtime it looks more naturally aged so then come back scrape off some more paint will then apply a little bit of black shoe polish see what that looks like and the black definitely dirties it up a lot more than the brown and so the combination of the black the brown and the brush really helps sort of push that color out nicely one common wear pattern then is on the top side where your arms gonna rest and I've got a Stu Mac scraper we're gonna just scrape off some more of that paint trying to get it to curve in a little bit try and pull some some of that color out again this is taken off the poly and then a little bit of the paint as well so then I try and continue to use different types of tools to get that wear pattern to look right you can plot a file get a couple different types of scratches I really do think the wire brush works the best to pull off that Sheen and so here the file just gets a couple different types of marks into the body a lot of guys use those felt pads I like doing that and the last guitar Aged I really thought the wire brush was the better way to go again will ding up the side with the file like I said different wear patterns at different times different tools different tool marks you can see it's definitely a little bit lighter of a color it's pulling off some of that shininess of the new body come back with a little bit more Brown and what's nice now is all the different dings I've got the Browns starting to sit in those holes some of those cracks and it's got definitely much more aged pattern will come back and forth with the brown and the black in different stages here to get different colors different wear marks so I'll rub some of it in wipe some of it off scrape some of it off and get it to sit in different spots so we'll come back with the hand sander and the open grain sandpaper and just pull more of this out the sandpaper really helps against the wire brush and the colouring you don't want too much color and there but you just want enough so that's sort of the the secret sauce also rubbing here with some steel wool again trying to knock down some of that bright poly it pulls off a little bit more color too so this is sort of a medium relict body heavy I could have just continued to scrape more off I didn't think that looked all that natural and as I was looking at it I don't think taking that aging off on the top left bout was right but rubbing in all the different color and the shoe polish kind of helped balance it all out I think with a poly guitar you've got a couple of options you can go really heavy which i don't think looks right this is sort of medium heavy and when you do it light I'm not sure that looks right either so I think this was sort of the good in-between you could see that black guitar from earlier the heavier eleking didn't look right at all it's at least here I've got some more nitro ish vigor all in I've probably got two hours into this will move to aging the hardware next so this is muriatic acid i speeded this video up double time here but we'll use the wire brush to rub some of the sheen off the hardware and in another video I did with the Jack Daniels guitar I let this fumigate and age it and I did this over a couple hours with this today I wanted to relic it faster so I dipped it in the muriatic acid for only an hour so we rubbed this with the wire brush rubbed all the different hardware just to give it a little bit of a scuff and then we dropped it in the acid and let it sit for an hour and once that was done we came back and oiled it up and stopped that aging process this is the key to getting the hardware to look in line with the body you don't want an aged body with new hardware that just won't look right but the scuff marks will help age it up with me or attic acid and here again I didn't want to over relic it that's why I knew if I dipped it for an hour it would look a little bit better so we'll scuff up the different parts of the body leave all the screws intact I'll just make sure that I've got just enough that it looks right that control plate is really flimsy some of the stuff I bought from China is nicer quality than that one it's about half the thickness of the stuff from China I don't understand how on this American telly that is such sort of low quality I don't I don't understand that probably my only complaint as I was doing this so we'll dip in the bridge we dip in the screw heads so that they look slightly aged and they'll come back after an hour and you can see that bridge looks pretty good just enough so we'll pop these out and we'll let them dry fish this stuff out with the end of a paintbrush I'm gonna take a little bit more acid and rub it on the control plate here just didn't age as well as the bridge even with scraping it so after about another hour I came back with my three in one oil and we're just gonna rub the three-in-one oil on to the hardware and clean it up get a clean paper towel make sure all that oils off of it then and then this sort of freezes the aging process you won't get the hardware to age anymore after that needed a little bit more muriatic acid on the tops of the pickups and on that bridge pickup wasn't looking right and then one of the things I found to age the pick guard was just a little bit of heat a little bit of heat pulled off a little bit of the shininess and it gave it more of that sort of older looking top I don't want to put the stain on the side I didn't think that looked right but a little bit of heat just took off the shininess you don't leave the heat on too long you'll melt it obviously but a little bit of heat just helps slightly and I've gotten a screwdriver and the pickup selector switch top and we light that on fire for a second and that's it gets a little bit icky and bubbly but looks pretty good then so time to assemble this sucker back up and we're just going to resolder all the wires reassemble this and make sure everything's looking good like I said earlier I had about two hours in this it's freezing outside perfect to do this over a weekend didn't take all that long the poly finish on these tallies just didn't look all that right I didn't like it I think if I had just taken some felt pads and rubbed it off probably would have been fine here ih it a little bit more with some screwdrivers and heat and cold I think it gives it a little bit more of a warning look that's obviously the style today if you guys don't like it I can't really help you there but I think the body looks pretty good from where it was we're gonna go ahead and do the neck next that one I really don't want to age too much because the poly is so thick it's not gonna look all that well took a little bit of flame to the top piece there just to give it a little bit of a darker of a color knock the sides a couple here and there and scratch the top I think the body's looking pretty good from where it was before here's the before and after side by side we'll do the neck next and it won't be as much aging as I'm on the body we'll do a little bit lighter but we want to take that Sheen down so thanks for watching guys we'll see you in the next video

Channel: BIGDGUITARS

Views: 114,249

Keywords: aged guitar, relic polyurethane guitar, how to relic a guitar with poly finish, aging a guitar, relic guitar body, how to relic a polyurethane guitar, relic telecaster, telecaster relic, how to relic a telecaster, guitar aging, relic guitar finish, relicing a telecaster, how to relic a guitar body, guitar relicing, relicing a guitar, how to relic a guitar, how to relic guitar, how to distress a guitar, relic a guitar, relic guitar hardware, relic guitar neck, Relic guitar

Id: ozU4E-RRnxM

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019