HTS Protect Signatures

A risky task is protecting signatures on a guitar.

The signatures are usually applied with a permanet marker and on a dirty guitar body, everything that goes against painting.

With some forethought one can really keep these signatures by a few simple steps.

This walk through is showing how we protect signatures from wear

Time to repair approx 2 hrs over 3 days (paint drying times)

There are a few spots, were the band got over exhuberant with their signatures, so we need to scuff the areaswhich had not been prepared with the 1000 grit sandpaper.

One of the most important things to coinsider when covering signatures is the paint.

I only cover signatures with an acrylic based paint, nitro or two pack clears all have very strong solvents in the mix and can dissolve signatures very quickly or even make them run.

Apply 4-6 coats of clear lacquer.

Using 1000 grit sandpaper / detergent / water we wet sand the surface smooth and flat.

Unfortunatley you cannot or should not buff a guitar that has signatures, if the paint or signature does not have a strong hold on the original surface, the friction from the buffer can lift the signatures straight off.

So we use micro mesh sanding pads.

Wet sand.

Continue until all the clear lacquer is nice and flat.

Using the micro mesh, we wet sand up in the grades all the way up to 24000 grit, basically until we have a nice reflective surface.

Re-assemble guitar.

In a perfect world, the customer would have scuffed the surface of the guitar and made it spotlessly clean prior to getting it signed.

Luckily for me, on this one its a perfect-ish world, the guitar had been scuffed, but it does have some of the band memebers DNA (sweat / oils) on the surface.

We scuff with 1000 grit sandpaper.

All exposed sections of the guitar cleaned and scuffed.