Aging a new pickguard

Okay, so I bought this old Mosrite "Joe Maphis" double-neck guitar. (Pictures coming soon.) It had a not so well-made replacement pickguard on it; so I decided to make a new one myself, which turned out quite well. But the new white plastic is WHITE, which is fine, but it looks out of place on a vintage guitar. So I wanted to give it something approximating the yellowish patina that the original would have acquired from 40 years in smokey nightclubs.

Now, you can Google up lots of suggestions for how to do this; e.g., soaking the pickguard in hot coffee, lacquering the pickguard and putting it out in the sun, and burning a few cartons of cigarettes in a homemade cardboard smoker. But nothing is as effective, quick, and non-stinky as spraying with amber-tinted lacquer.

Before I go into details, here's the result atop the remainder of the white sheet from which it was cut.



Now for the details. For lack of spraying equipment, I am restricted to good old "rattle cans" of lacquer. You can get cans of amber-tinted lacquer from Stewart-MacDonald or Guitar ReRanch. But it is impossible to get the right tint with these, because it takes several coats to make the color uniform (not splotchy), and by that time the color is way too deep (i.e., orange). Basically, these lacquers are just too dark for the job, and you need to mix a much lighter tint. So what's an amateur to do?

To the rescue comes the Preval sprayer, which costs $6.75 at StewMac. What you see below is the (detached) spraying unit with reservoir bottle containing some leftover lacquer from the job.



The stuff in the bottle is probably 2/3 lacquer thinner. The rest consists of a mix of clear lacquer and amber-tinted lacquer -- from spray cans -- with a very tiny shot of tobacco brown lacquer (from StewMac). It looks about like a nice amber beer. After a few light coats of this, I got the color I wanted. (Actually I wish I had left off the last coat, so it would be just a touch lighter.)

By the way, I recommend a few coats of clear lacquer as a base -- lightly sanded with 400 grit paper, just enough to smooth out most of the orange peel. And lightly sand the plastic first, too.

If I had it to do over, I'd probably replace much of the thinner in the mix with clear lacquer so it would flow a bit better. Again, ideally you'd want to mix the stuff up like a pro -- not from rattle cans. But this got the job done. This time.