Finishing school
ONCE THOUGHT OF AS MERELY A SPRUCE-UP FOR BATTERED GUITARS, THE HUMBLE REFINISH IS TURNING INTO A DESIRABLE MOD IN ITS OWN RIGHT. WE TALK TO SCOTT CAMERON OF SPECIALIST REFINISHING FIRM SC RELICS ABOUT THE PROS AND CONS OF GETTING A NEW PAINT JOB...
Therearenowseveralspecialist firms that undertake guitar refinishing, and the services they offer range from factory-fresh refinishes to aged paint jobs that make your brand-new Strat look like it’s got five decades on the clock.
Scott Cameron’s company, SC Relics, specialises in beautiful nitro-based refinishes and he says a refinish can be a relatively accessible way to give your guitar a unique custom vibe – provided you get the work done by a quality firm and go into it with your eyes open…
What things should you consider before getting your guitar refinished? “The first thing to weigh up is whether you feel it’s worth doing a refinish on a particular guitar. We get all kinds of stuff in to refinish: everything from the body of a three grand Custom Shop Fender, down to a Squier Strat or what have you. So do you really want to take a Mexican-built guitar and strip it down, then spend £300 on a body refinish? After all, your guitar might only be worth £300 secondhand. Same with the neck; you could spend £250 refinishing the neck. So all of a sudden, your cheap guitar has become fairly expensive.” What are the pros and cons of getting your guitar professionally refinished versus doing it yourself? “You can do it yourself, of course, but it tends to get expensive if you don’t have the tools. You can get a heat gun and a scraper for about £20, but then it’s about getting the finish off without damaging the guitar and you’ve got to do your prep work. So you have to be reasonably good at working with your hands and with tools.
“Once we’ve established the reasons why a customer wants to refinish their guitar and checked they’re okay with the finances, that’s when we can get them onboard and establish what they want to do with the guitar. But if they decide it’s more than they want to spend, we’ll give them some links to where they can buy good nitro in cans and offer a rundown of the starting points needed to do the job themselves.” What are some common challenges encountered when refinishing a guitar to a customer’s exacting requirements? “When customers send us pictures of finishes they’ve seen on other guitars and say, ‘Can you make it look like that?’, it’s a good reference point. But once we’ve stripped their guitar back, we might find it has a five-piece alder body underneath the old finish. So if they want it to end up looking like a two-piece ash-body ’54 Strat, that’s obviously not going to happen.
“But customers usually have more than one idea for what they want – so when we go back to them and show them a picture once the body’s been stripped, they’ll sometimes say, ‘Oh yeah, a Sunburst isn’t going to work. Let’s go Candy Apple Red,’ or something like that. Or we might suggest a new body so they can still achieve their dream finish.” What are the most popular requests, finish-wise? “Sunbursts and Paisley – in fact, we’re one of the only UK firms that offer a good Paisley finish. When it comes to straight refinishing, it’ll depend on what we find when we strip the body, and then the customer will make a decision. But there’s nothing weird, generally. There’s no 80s neon superstrat finishes. There’s no heavy sparkle finishes. Our bread and butter are the classics: Lake Placid Blue, Seafoam Green, Olympic White. The early 60s stuff is the big draw.”
“Our customers usually want us to mimic the finish of a guitar that was, say, built in 1962 but has been beaten up and heavily discoloured by time”
How do you match your finishes to original vintage colours accurately? “The guys who supply our paints offer base shades that are very close to the original finish colours – but often our customers don’t want the exact colour a vintage guitar would have been when it came out of the factory. They usually want us to mimic the finish of a guitar that was, say, built in 1962 but has been beaten up and heavily discoloured by time. So we’ve got to think, ‘How did that guitar acquire its unique hue? Has it gone yellow or has it browned?’
“We always start the process close to the original base colour, though. We don’t mix the paints ‘pre-aged’. In other words, if we hit upon a paint mix that accurately mimics the colour of a specific vintage guitar, we don’t then just mix up a big tin of that. We’ll go back and start with the original base colour, then build up an aged clear coat on top of that to mimic how that guitar changed over time.
“When you start stripping back vintage guitars, you’ll see the top coat discolours with age. But underneath, when that’s rubbed away, you’ll still have traces of the fresher colour it originally was, and beneath that you have the primer. Fender used all sorts of things for that – whatever was left over. Desert Sand would get used, for example. I’ve even seen Daphne Blue underneath Lake Placid in the past; they’d obviously just taken a Daphne Blue guitar and sprayed Lake Placid over the top of it. So when these things get aged, there’s often many layers of wonderment going on.”
“We start the process close to the original base colour, then build up an aged clear coat on top of that to mimic how that guitar changed over time”
What special considerations should you take with a genuine vintage guitar? “Whenever a vintage body comes in I geek out and enjoy seeing the dowel holes on the body [Fender used dowels to fill holes made by tooling during manufacturing] and the original colour in the cavities and all that. But the customer might say, ‘This thing’s a mess – can you fix it? It’s full of dents.’ So you’ve got to get the old finish off, which is the same as if they’d brought a poly-finish Mexican-built guitar to us. Then, when you’ve got the wood flat and smooth again, you can proceed to the next step.
“So the vintage thing is strange: we may look at a guitar with reverence and say, ‘Oh, wow! A vintage Fender.’ But the customer may say, ‘I’ve had it for 40 years and it needs a complete overhaul.’ And if that’s the case they might not want it to be returned to an original state – they might have been looking at it for decades and want to do something different with it. We have to respect that.
“If there’s something on it that the customer wants to keep, then obviously we work around it. There’s dates, stamps… all sorts of things. We work around them and we don’t cover them. There can even be marks that look like an ordinary dent or ding to us but are important to the customer because they remember the night it happened at a gig or something – and we’ve got to work around that, too. Every customer is different.” How does the process differ when the customer wants their brand-new guitar refinished to look old? “First, we get the customer to send us pictures of old guitars they like the look of. Then, once we’ve stripped the body back, we’ll send them a picture because that might influence what they want done. As we said earlier, we might find it’s a fivepiece body with ugly joins, so a Sunburst isn’t going to work. At that point, they might say, ‘Okay, make it Lake Placid Blue.’ Once they’ve made their decision, we get to work and once we’ve painted the body, we’ll send them a picture and say, ‘Right, there’s your Lake Placid Blue Tele body that you sent us a couple of months ago. It’s now drying, what do you think?’ And they might look at it at that point [prior to any further ageing processes being applied] and say, ‘That came out nicer than I thought it would.’
“By then, it’ll probably already have some nice features like the vintage-style ‘tan lines’ where we’ve taken the hardware off and painted the original colour under the hardware but applied a slightly darker tint on the rest of the body. At that point, some customers who originally wanted a heavily aged finish might say, ‘Could you leave it like that?’ Or, ‘Maybe just add the lacquer checking at the end?’ All the bodies are taken up to as close to ‘new old stock’ condition as we can get them first – and only then do we apply further ageing techniques as the customer requests. They are free to change their mind at any point.” https://screlics.co.uk
“We may look at a guitar with reverence and say, ‘Oh, wow! A vintage Fender.’ But the customer might’ve had it for 40 years and want an overhaul”