Vintage Vs Refin finish flaking?

[JSett]

I have a quick question that I couldn't find an answer to on here or through research:

On vintage Fenders, where the paint has flaked off, they tend to flake in layers of lacquer then colour but showing the white undercoat still. And then eventually the wood. Modern nitro flakes off as a whole I've noticed. And a lot (not all) of people who do the relic thing don't achieve the correct layers.

Seeing as nitro technically fuses with the undercoat on application I can't work out why the old ones come off like they do.

I thought maybe the bodies were all undercoated and then racked at the factory then, when the order for the custom colour came in, they pulled one out that had long cured and shot over that. Would that cause the layered flaking? If that's what even happened in the factory.

Thoughts or facts welcome

[Embenny]

Vintage Fenders weren't nitro all the way down. In just about every era, they all had, at minimum, sealers that weren't nitro.

Take this '64 Strat for example:



You can see that it's yellow underneath the paint where it flaked off, and ghat the yellow itself wore away to wood at the forearm.

Fender applied the yellow stain to the body before the sealer (which wasn't always Fullerplast, but that's the most famous name that gets mentioned). Also, a lot of people think Fullerplast was yellow, but it was clear. It's just that they stained every body yellow first before sealing, because they wouldn't know what colour it would be at that point, and the yellow was needed for the default sunburst.

So I've always chuckled when I've read people complain on forums that modern AVRIs didn't have "true" nitro finishes, because they had a poly sealer and base coat. That's actually closer to vintage-accurate than someone who sprays nothing but nitro.

I don't know specifically about the formulation of the white primer/undercoat used on many CCs, but I do know that undercoats were highly variable. Some examples of the same CC in the same year will differ in terms of the presence of the undercoat. Some were sprayed directly onto finished sunbursts. And of course, CAR had the metallic base layer underneath the translucent colour coat, so I don't think you'll ever find a single way that a given colour ages or flakes off. They were made with quite a grab bag of painting methods.

[Highnumbers]

I don't think you'll ever find a single way that a given colour ages or flakes off. They were made with quite a grab bag of painting methods.

Yep and they also age in vastly different ways depending on the range of conditions in which the guitar has lived. A Fender that has never left the dry desert of California will age entirely different to the extreme temperature and humidity changes of New York etc.

That's one of the hardest parts of doing restoration-level finish aging, you basically have to choose which version of aging you want to emulate.

Personally I haven't noticed flaking of a single layer of finish. Usually when it flakes, all top coats, color coats and primer substrates flake off together, and only under extreme conditions.

I have a '64 Jazzmaster (original factory sonic blue) that was oversprayed at one point and then sat in a cupboard in South Africa seriously drying out for 40 years. The finish was flaking off so bad that it left a trail of paint chips every time I handled it. The body has been subsequently refinished, but here's a 'before' shot:

[zhivago]

[Jaguar018]

Paint flaking off and making a horrible mess? "That looks awesome. I'd leave it as-is"
©OSG

[PorkyPrimeCut]

Paint flaking off and making a horrible mess? "That looks awesome. I'd leave it as-is"
©OSG

But play it solidly for a couple of months & there'll be no finish left.

[JVG]

The Guitar HQ site is fairly well regarded, and has a lengthy discussion about paints.
http://guitarhq.com/fenderc.html

The key takeaway points from this article, as I saw it, are:

* Colour coats on alder bodies between about 1956 and 1968 were either nitro (most solid colours) or acrylic (most metallic colours).

* Colour coats were usually done over a clear, non-lacquer sealer (such as the Fullerplast described above), sometimes with a white lacquer undercoat between the sealer and the colour. However, on occasions, colours were painted straight onto bare wood, without sealer.

* Clear coats over the colour - if they were applied at all - were always nitro (pre-1968). Solid colours did not always get a clear coat over them but metallics always did, to mitigate the oxidation of the metallic particles.

* Most bodies were initially prepared as sunburst, in which case they were dipped in yellow dye prior to getting the sealer or colour applied. If a custom colour was ordered, it would either be done over the top of a sunburst, or sometimes from scratch.

As such, if you ordered a custom metallic colour, it could consist of all the following layers:
Yellow dye -> clear (non-lacquer) sealer -> nitro sunburst -> white (nitro or acrylic) undercoat -> acrylic metallic coats -> nitro clear coat.

At the other end of the scale, if you ordered a custom solid colour it could consist of just that colour over bare wood, or colour over white undercoat (which is how the flakey blue example in this thread looks), without any dye, sealer, or clear coat.

Point being, that the “flakeability” of any particular finish could be significantly affected by the sequence and type of paints used.

[Highnumbers]

Paint flaking off and making a horrible mess? "That looks awesome. I'd leave it as-is"
©OSG

Totally expected response from people who haven’t handled this particular guitar.

It’s not fun to pick a guitar up for two minutes and have your shirt covered in paint flakes. A strong breeze would have stripped this guitar clean of its finish.

I think it looks way better with a restored finish (which is what it has now).

[Embenny]

Paint flaking off and making a horrible mess? "That looks awesome. I'd leave it as-is"
©OSG

Totally expected response from people who haven’t handled this particular guitar.

It’s not fun to pick a guitar up for two minutes and have your shirt covered in paint flakes. A strong breeze would have stripped this guitar clean of its finish.

I think it looks way better with a restored finish (which is what it has now).

Well, I'm part of OSG and I'm 100% in camp "refinish that mofo!"

I have an ancient sparkle finish guitar that is shedding glitter. It's not fun. I don't have OCD, but picking little bits of my guitar off of me after I played it is...highly unpleasant, to say the least.

There's some question as to whether it's an original 1960s Fender sparkle job, though, so I can't bring myself to refinish it. If I can prove definitively that it's a refin, it'd getting stripped and reapplied, or maybe just oversprayed with a clear coat, but I don't want to mess with it...yet.

But it's not shedding nearly as much as yours was. I'd inky have played that guitar once - to check that it was OK - before taking some photos for posterity and sending it off to be refinished.

[JSett]

Paint flaking off and making a horrible mess? "That looks awesome. I'd leave it as-is"
©OSG

Totally expected response from people who haven’t handled this particular guitar.

It’s not fun to pick a guitar up for two minutes and have your shirt covered in paint flakes. A strong breeze would have stripped this guitar clean of its finish.

I think it looks way better with a restored finish (which is what it has now).

Yeah, I can imagine that being horrible, and I'd have had it restored too. It wasn't the 'cool' kind of wear and tear at all.

[JSett]

The Guitar HQ site is fairly well regarded, and has a lengthy discussion about paints.
http://guitarhq.com/fenderc.html

The key takeaway points from this article, as I saw it, are:

* Colour coats on alder bodies between about 1956 and 1968 were either nitro (most solid colours) or acrylic (most metallic colours).

* Colour coats were usually done over a clear, non-lacquer sealer (such as the Fullerplast described above), sometimes with a white lacquer undercoat between the sealer and the colour. However, on occasions, colours were painted straight onto bare wood, without sealer.

* Clear coats over the colour - if they were applied at all - were always nitro (pre-1968). Solid colours did not always get a clear coat over them but metallics always did, to mitigate the oxidation of the metallic particles.

* Most bodies were initially prepared as sunburst, in which case they were dipped in yellow dye prior to getting the sealer or colour applied. If a custom colour was ordered, it would either be done over the top of a sunburst, or sometimes from scratch.

As such, if you ordered a custom metallic colour, it could consist of all the following layers:
Yellow dye -> clear (non-lacquer) sealer -> nitro sunburst -> white (nitro or acrylic) undercoat -> acrylic metallic coats -> nitro clear coat.

At the other end of the scale, if you ordered a custom solid colour it could consist of just that colour over bare wood, or colour over white undercoat (which is how the flakey blue example in this thread looks), without any dye, sealer, or clear coat.

Point being, that the “flakeability” of any particular finish could be significantly affected by the sequence and type of paints used.

This is good info, some I knew and some I didn't.

With the original question, I've definitely seen some old custom colours that have flaked in layers a little (mostly Mustangs, Musicmasters and the occasional Jag). I guess there's a myriad of potential factors from the way it was prepped, time curing, how many coats or even the weather that day.

[Highnumbers]

I'd inky have played that guitar once - to check that it was OK - before taking some photos for posterity and sending it off to be refinished.

Yep! That’s exactly what I did, took photos for posterity and started stripping it (with a bristle brush!) didn’t even string it up.

But the good news is that it’s en route back to me from being restored in the UK and looks a whole lot better. I’ll post pics next weekend

[øøøøøøø]

With old Fenders "the only rule is that there are no rules"

There was a certain... improvisational spirit that's apparent in old Fender manufacture. By all accounts (and by all evidence), Leo and his people would do anything at all to:

1) get the orders out the door on time
2) keep things moving in the event of a supply chain issue or materials inventory shortfall
3) find ways to streamline production and keep costs down

As a result, it's really hard to make any definitive statements of "how old Fenders are" or "what old Fenders do" or "how old Fenders age/wear/break/etc"

Obviously there are trends, patterns, and typical cases. But exceptions and exceptional behaviors aren't at all rare.

In a sense, 1-3 things being a little weird make me more likely to accept a guitar's provenance