C18Q1 - Making a thick Poly finish look a lot less awful

johnl · January 2018

I recently picked up an lower end 80s Greco which had survived the intervening 30 years essentially unscathed thanks to about 3 feet of solid lacquer. Great playing guitar but there was a bit too much "boiled sweet" about the finish:

Armed only with an orbital sander, some scouring pads and some 1500 and 2000 grit sandpaper it ended up looking like this:

Not sure why the photos have a bit of a vaseline-smeared finish to them, assuming that was just poor lighting. Either way for a few hours work the guitar now feels a huge amount better, still needs a quick polish but overall I'm very pleased.

GoldenEraGuitars · January 2018

Looks mega mate, well done

munckee · January 2018

A decent car polish and a buffer attachment on a drill will give it a shine, noting like the original but looks good.

johnl · January 2018

munckee said:

A decent car polish and a buffer attachment on a drill will give it a shine, noting like the original but looks good.

Yeah, I think I grabbed the wrong one - tried that with Meguiars Shine x2 or whatever it's called and it left a very metallic glitter in the finish. It's not quite as smeary as it looks in the photos above but I'm going to give it a shot with some turtle wax and see what happens.

munckee · January 2018

I use turtle wax and its nice. I also have Dr Ducks Ax Wax which I use on guitars as a general cleaner which gives a subtle shine, prolongs strings too apparently.

johnl · May 2018

Bit of an update on this one. Since the last post I managed to remove the tailpiece mounting rings using a jerry-rigged contraption consisting of some bits of an old vape, a bolt and a couple of washers. I've now fitted a full set of Schaller vintage copper hardware, some iron gear pickups (for the time being) and I'm waiting for some mother of pearl inlays to arrive so I can replace the existing inlays which have gone almost entirely transparent with age.