Fixing a small chip in a guitar finish

drop fills our tiny finish repairs when you get a chip or a ding and the finish like this and you have to touch it up I drop though with lacquer superglue polyester epoxy superglue is my favorite because it's the fastest and that's what I've been doing here I took acetone and poured it into a little cup and I took some blue color tones stain and I wasn't being too worried about it and I touched color to that chip and it sort of ran into the surrounding polyester you don't have to know a ton about finishing to do drop fills we're not spraying anything and we're not applying a finish we're just fixing it then I covered that with superglue I'll let this dry for a little bit and go on to one of the other ones let that dry drop filled with some more until it builds up above the surface the razor blade trick is something I learned from Frank Ford mr. fretts calm here's a single edge razor blade and you strike it along a piece of cast iron you can turn that little burr there's a tiny sharp glistening edge there now and you very carefully wrap it with the tape you want it to fold right over equally on both sides leaving only as much blade exposed as you need to cover the width of the fill and maybe a little extra cellophane tape is mm of an inch thick so that's my depth stop I'm not using a lot of pressure I'm just letting that blade trim down that glue I'm not gonna go all the way down because I can't get there I'm starting not to get anything anymore so I'm gonna quit soon and go on to strip sanding strip sanding happens in less than a minute it's so quick you have all your strips in order just a couple of pieces and you keep changing direction I'll cut strips of all the different grits and they mark the grit number on the paper because otherwise you might not know and the key is to know what grit to use and when to switch them I'm starting out with 400 grit and I'm not pulling it in just one direction I'll switch directions and you press down from the top with your finger to put pressure on the fill that's all kind of get I don't want to go too far because a lot of the color will be right on the surface of these things and of course I'm going to hit the outside area a little teeny bit then 600 go to 800 you might want to come in and look at that at that point I'm gonna quit with the strip sale and go to block sandy which means I'm gonna take a small block it could be wood with leather it might be Robert put double stick tape on it and put my smooth sand papers on that keeps it flat I don't want any sandpaper rounding up over the edge of the sanding block if you just wrap a block like that you've got these rounded edges no matter what you do and when you saying that's gonna hit first take the time to do this with the double stick tape and you have a perfectly flat sanding block it takes time if you're too lazy to do it you won't get as good of results what I'm doing is moving my scratches away from the area out onto this area I'm gonna go up to mm wipe the paper off you're trying to keep those little speckles off of it I'm gonna go up to three and four thousand and a different kind of paper now I am using water micro mesh paper it's less important to be perfectly flat at this stage there's 8,000 try it off look at the scratches when you wet sand you're really supposed to take the sand paper and put it in water 24 hours before you use it we've used it for years before we knew that that's an autobody trick the whole idea is the paper absorbs the water and it gets spongy it's designed for that 12,000 that's as fine as this micro mesh paper goes you can fill the grid it's cutting but it's super fine if I was going to use a buffer I could have stopped earlier I'm using a medium paste compound to buff this out by hand use the palm of my hand if I can because I can get a lot of pressure bringing it up to a nice shine I'm not gonna fix every drop fell on this I'm just using this as a guinea pig to show you a technique a my trade off was hey I'll glue your neck for you if you let me take my razor blade and do some scraping on this for a video I'm doing

Channel: StewMac

Views: 1,500,848

Rating: 4.9550514 out of 5

Keywords: stewmac, stewart, macdonald, guitar, repair, finish, drop, fill, guitar repair, guitar repair videos, stewart macdonald, dan erlewine, stewmac guitar, stewmac guitar repair, super glue, guitar finishing, guitar finish repair, guitar repair tools, guitar chip repair, guitar refinishing, guitar finishing techniques, guitar crack repair glue, frank ford, stewart macdonald trade secrets, stewart macdonald guitar repair, stewmac guitar finishing

Id: rTVScFJoe24

Length: 4min 16sec (256 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Coonpath]

Dan is an incredibly talented guitar repairman. I'm so glad he documented so many of his tips and tricks on youtube.

[u/TriennialSearchlight]

The Bob Ross of Guitar Repairmen

[u/confusedblues]

This guitar repairman is non other than Dan Erlewine. He's literally one of the best there is. I watch his videos all the time. His ingenuity and engineering or tools to fit specific tasks is incredible impressive. I honestly think he's a handy man genius. More than just learning how to fix certain things from his videos, he teaches problem solving. And he seems like a genuinely cool guy.

[u/WaterBottleFull]

Dan is a guitar repair god.

[u/AveryDiamond]

/r/artisanvideos

[u/CALLOFKTUTLU]

Oh man I use to watch this guys videos all the time. Such wisdom and knowledge on display

[u/grampasguitars]

Dan is the greatest. I've made a lot of money in the last 20 years fixing guitars and I learned a good chunk of what I know from Dan's book. Love that dude.

[u/orangek8]

That's my dad!! <3

[u/[deleted]]

I wonder if I would have noticed his voice as warm if the title hadn't said so.