Rotten Relics

[andrewdoeshair]

You guys got it. Polyurethane and polyester flex with the wood- won't check.

[Wessel.v.l]

could you make cheking with a thin razor blad?

[PorkyPrimeCut]

The guy who refinned my Jazzmaster (with nitrocellulose paint) left it for 24 hours in a deep-freezer, wrapped in a couple of towels.
After that he blasted it with a hair-dryer. Quite experimental at the time but with a bit of practice you'd be able to get good, even checking.
He held the dryer a little too close to the body in a couple of spots so you can kinda see the checking has "spidered" a bit. No biggy.

[PorkyPrimeCut]

could you make cheking with a thin razor blad?

I doubt it! It'd look way too fake, unless you were some kind of master-carver.

I've seen wood grain faked using thin pencil lines. Checking would be an entirely differnt level of skill.

[ndrsklg]

I just wanted to know how you do it, I want to build my next guitar from bare wood, and I want it to be a aged looking guitar.

Your selection of what lacquer to use is critical....

I collect "bad" lacquer from luthier friends--stuff that I know will crack and check when subjected to heat and cold...
Most modern lacquers will just laugh at you when you try to antique it, as it's full of plasticizers to inhibit checking....

Layer two different brands of lacquer, and they'll fight each other and crack...
Watco in the rattlecan is a good choice, as is anything from ReRanch...

I'm antiquing a GreTsch White Falcon as we speak, which was finished with lacquer at the Terada factory in Japan....
This stuff loves to check:











ooooohhh i am so in love with this white falcon... ive always had a soft spot for them but have never liked how new the new guys look. this is a good example (to me) of why relicing is a fun idea.

as for my own relicing ive done over the years, the one thing i would offer is patience. i look at it as a art restorer. you need to look at the piece and figure out what it needs, sartorially speaking... but dont do anything that could actually affect the playability and longevity of it. that probably could go unsaid though. dont pay attention to the haters, people are set in their ways and usually dont try very hard to empathize with different points of view / lifestyles... oh well! just have fun i guess!

[tonewoods]

ooooohhh i am so in love with this white falcon... ive always had a soft spot for them but have never liked how new the new guys look. this is a good example (to me) of why relicing is a fun idea.

Yeah, the new Gretsches are nicely made, but waaayyyy too shiny out-of-the-box...
I don't think the 50's-60's guitars ever looked like this....

...as for my own relicing ive done over the years, the one thing i would offer is patience.

Yep...
It takes time to replicate 50 years of wear, and it usually takes months, if not a full year...

[jingle_jangle]

Terada uses lacquer? I thought only the custom shop in Corona used nitro.

Polyester doesn't flex with the wood. It is so hard and impermeable that it keeps the wood encased. You can get polyester to check, but you've got to treat it to real extremes.

Polyurethane is quite flexible and forgiving, but will check, too, and rather easily if exposed to extreme cold and then heat in a short period.

[andrewdoeshair]

Cool. I was just repeating the poly rhetoric I've picked up in my short time at this hobby.

[antisymmetric]

poly would seem to me to be more elastic than nitro, and probably won't check as easy no matter how thin you coat it. im really just going by the names here, but wouldn't polyester (petroleum byproduct through chemical process) be more resilient than nitrocellulose (which i am admittedly equating in my mind with the stuff inside the cell walls of plants)? i am thinking: staying alive disco suit, stretchy. twigs, brittle.

No wonder my disco suit made from twigs didn't wear well.

[jingle_jangle]

I just want to say that however you feel about relics, etc, you've really got no call to give out intentionally bad advice to someone's honest request. At least let them know you're joking. Whether or not you think your "joke advice" is plausible or not doesn't matter. Without the context clues to know you're pulling their leg, you could have someone out there ruining the electronics in their guitar, soaking up moisture into the wood (especially if they've knocked it around some already), and separating body halves as a result.

it's just mean-spirited and malicious. kind of like threatening to get a certain guitar manufacturer to sue hobbyists over their homemade tribute/reproductions.

I never threatened to do anything of the sort. Put on your reading glasses. That Rickenbacker thread is over and done with, and I was issuing a heads-up to older_brother so he was aware that this sort of thing has legal implications. He and I are at peace, I believe, and hopefully most have noticed that I've avoided the topic in this Forum, ever since. Some folks never forget, like my wife...

I don't want enemies, but let's at least be fair and not read into things. I strive for clarity; still in a written medium, there's always room for misinterpretation. So I'll clarify:

Mean-spirited? You recognized my comments as humor, but I was DEAD FRICKIN' SERIOUS. The Strat I'm talking about is a Cobain junker that a guy in the UK did with great humor and a lot of beer. I paid something like $80.00 for it. It's almost convincing, except for the Dremel marks all over it, when you get within 3 feet, and the too-new Sqier neck--so I've stripped out the wiring and it's getting buried in the back yard where the deer pee, so it gets nice and nasty and hopefully begins to split, get a good deal grayer and hide the Dremel marks.

I will provide a video link to the burying process for a good laugh, right after I've tossed it into the fireplace for awhile, which I also plan to video. I want charred, split (both natural processes!) body and burnt, but still structurally sound neck, into which I want to install brand new electronics with nasty knobs, burnt pickguard, pickup cover, etc. I've got a nice stock of junk parts for this.

It then will get an aged Valco lap steel pickup and put on a raised nut. E6, open D or open G tuning, and it will be my Atomic Coodercaster.

Yes, I don't like phony overpriced relics, mostly because they're a cheat: sold by Fender to wealthy starfuckers and wannabees. That having been said, I do own three inexpensive relics done by two different builders, one of whom is our old friend ADH, who is one heck of a guy, as we all know, and the other the above-mentioned Strat. I buy Andrew's builds because I like what he does, he's a real good guy, and I believe in supporting other craftspeople.

If anything I do is mean-spirited and malicious, I welcome you to unfog your glasses and unbunch your knickers, croatan. Don't take one thread where I came off too heavy, and use that one thread to judge my initial post in this thread, ignoring my hundreds of other posts in between.

Look at my posts on this Forum, and you'll find that I'm always willing to help, coach, express my enthusiasm, and lend a hand, because I've been doing what I do for a long time, and if I can be helpful, I believe in sharing methods, materials, processes, and (yes) philosophy.

If you or anybody else thinks I've got my head up my nether regions, you're welcome to call a spade a spade; it's only fair and I heard from plenty of OSGers after that Rickenbacker thread.

Let's build and learn and laugh our asses off at the crazy world we live in and the nutty things we do. Life's too short to be nasty or to hold any grudges.

[duncanjames]

Find a drummer that's okay with you dropping your guitar on their cymbals...

[croatan]

sure i admit that i could have misunderstood. given the terseness of the first post and your well established Clint-Eastwood-in-Gran-Turino stance on relics, it might have been more productive to go into that novella level of detail with the first post instead of leaving it short and easily interperable as a quip. from your short post, it looked about equivalent to telling someone with computer program problems that the answer is to hold down alt and f4, or to go to a command prompt and type delete c:\*.*

burying your axe has been around at least since the BeBop era, sure. i've never done it but i would certainly try that before leaving a guitar out in the rain. just seems like a recipe for swollen wood, weaker neck pocket, and other warping issues (like squier multi-piece bodies with a thin veneer of some other wood over the top).

with regard to "living down" the rick thread, i don't think you really can. it happened, it colored the way some of us think about you, and that's not a bad thing, that's life. you build yourself up from what you've done and said and what you are, not what you should've done, wished you had said better, and wished you were. it's not like it comes up every day, and you can easily see how it would come to mind when taking you to task about this.
if you'd really like us all to be honest about it with you and "call a spade a spade," it would be easier to buy if you weren't advocating for open honest criticism on the one hand and throwing around petty language like "unfog your glasses" , "unbunch your panties" (which i think is actually a pretty sexist thing to say to anyone man or woman) , or "put on your reading glasses" from the other.

there, i've said my piece, that's my perspective.

[garyptaszek]

... play it... play the crap out of it... don't use a a case for it when in a gigging band (a'la Johnny Somersett)

[jingle_jangle]

sure i admit that i could have misunderstood. given the terseness of the first post and your well established Clint-Eastwood-in-Gran-Turino stance on relics, it might have been more productive to go into that novella level of detail with the first post instead of leaving it short and easily interperable as a quip. from your short post, it looked about equivalent to telling someone with computer program problems that the answer is to hold down alt and f4, or to go to a command prompt and type delete c:\*.*

burying your axe has been around at least since the BeBop era, sure. i've never done it but i would certainly try that before leaving a guitar out in the rain. just seems like a recipe for swollen wood, weaker neck pocket, and other warping issues (like squier multi-piece bodies with a thin veneer of some other wood over the top).

with regard to "living down" the rick thread, i don't think you really can. it happened, it colored the way some of us think about you, and that's not a bad thing, that's life. you build yourself up from what you've done and said and what you are, not what you should've done, wished you had said better, and wished you were. it's not like it comes up every day, and you can easily see how it would come to mind when taking you to task about this.
if you'd really like us all to be honest about it with you and "call a spade a spade," it would be easier to buy if you weren't advocating for open honest criticism on the one hand and throwing around petty language like "unfog your glasses" , "unbunch your panties" (which i think is actually a pretty sexist thing to say to anyone man or woman) , or "put on your reading glasses" from the other.

there, i've said my piece, that's my perspective.

You're 100% correct that I should have been more specific, if only for your sake, in my first post in this thread. It could have made all the difference, and I'll try to keep being as specific as possible in future.

You saw "panties?" I wrote, "knickers", which refers to underthings of both genders.

It seems like my carefully-chosen words (again) have been misread. Now I'm "sexist" because of something YOU read, not something I wrote...now who's a bit vague?

Lest this descend further into petty bickering, I'll applaud (and join with) those who've moved this thread on. I've said my piece. If my previous comments colored your opinion of me, you're right, croatan, that is life. I realize that some people are judgmental and the rest just move on.

[jim93]

Playing the hell out of it wont make your guitar check nor will it make your nitro yellow