CLIVE BROWN
We uncover the roots of Fender’s vintage blonde finish with guitar-finishing master Clive Brown
“In the late 40s and the 50s, furniture was very popular in a blonde colour. It was modern at the time. If you go back to the pre-war era, everybody had dark furniture, but after the war, people decided to make it a bit lighter – I remember my mum and dad getting new light oak furniture! All the guitar industry was doing was moving with whatever else was going on, be it in the motor industry or the furniture industry. You see the custom colours coming in in the late 50s because that’s where fashion was going. You’ve only got to look at the American cars.
“They used ash for blonde finishes only because it was a prominent grain. Ash is very hard on machinery – it blunts your cutters easily, so in ’56 they went to alder, keeping ash just for blondes. Blonde finishes were simple. There wasn’t anything that was difficult to do because ‘difficult to do’ takes time. They were using furniture material to do the blonde finishes very early on, but they quickly changed to automotive paint. Fender wanted an easy way of doing it and the easy way of doing of it was using nitrocellulose because it dries quickly, and you can mix it up quickly. They ordered it in whatever colour they wanted, and the factory probably mixed it lighter.
“You make a basic wash up. It was Desert Sand in the early days – y’know, a beige, Rich Tea biscuit kind of colour. You grain-fill the ash, then you put that on as a base coat in sort of a wash, so you can see through it a bit – maybe one or two coats – then you finish it off with clearcoat lacquer (with maybe a slight yellow tint). If you look at an early blackguard in really good condition, it has a tendency to look more of a creamy colour than butterscotch. A good friend of mine, Alan Rogan, showed me a really clean early Fender – it was in excellent condition – and that looked more of a cream colour than butterscotch. By ’54, they’re starting to get paler and paler, and by the time you’ve hit the late 50s, it isn’t really a Desert Sand – it’s more of a transparent Olympic White.”