Melt scratches off your guitar?

hi I'm maintenance for Brooklyn Missouri and what I wanted to show you guys today is a pretty good way to lessen the appearance of scratches or dings on an older guitar that's finished with nitrocellulose lacquer and I guess we need to think about why those dings and scratches are so visible and it's not because you know they tend to look like a lighter amber color not because there's some amber smeared on the guitar not because that's the color of the wood under the finish it's because when the finish gets get scratched or dinged agitated it cracks a little bit and so when you have a long a long scratch there's a bunch of these little kind of micro cracks and each one of those fissures refract light and there am buried because nitro is Ambree so what we're going to do is use lacquer retarder or n-butyl to melt just the surface of all those little tiny cracks back together so that then you have one you know one substance one layer of nitro it works quite well those little fissures just like wick the liquid in like a capillary action and does a pretty good job of disappearing old scratches so I'm going to show you all how that's done using a little tiny brush and some black retarder going to kitchen since start disappearing it's a pretty good trick you know vintage dealers know it so now I'm really going to focus on this long scrape right here pre-law it's that ambery color so let's see if we can get that to come off just a word to the wise lacquer retarder is a solvent pretty powerful so you'd want to make sure that you're using it in a well-ventilated area and that you don't stick it up close to your face and Huff it or drink it know this really work really work I told the truth so when I drop in the solvent and it'll right away weekend we'll see what it's done you know usually works pretty well but we'll see what we have right away then you'd want to wait long enough for that to read rye because it really is a solvent that's going to soften the lacquer and that's all there is to it [Music]

Channel: StewMac

Views: 259,925

Keywords: guitar repair, guitar building, guitar making, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, classical guitar, diy, how to, dan erlewine, trade secrets, luthier, lutherie, fretboard, fingerboard, stringed instruments, mandolin, banjo, electric bass, bass guitar, brookyln lutherie, mamie minch, melt guitar scratch, remove scratch, fix scratch, cellulose, lacquer, nitrocellulose, New York City, brush, melt, melt finish, scratch retarder, Mamie Minch, Chloe Swantner, Brooklyn Lutherie, John Peden

Id: FISY9I6pQdQ

Length: 2min 35sec (155 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2017