Gibson SG crack repair help

[Trent Cudd]

Hello,

I have a customer who brought in a Gibson reissue SG. The bottom half at the control cavity had been broken off and then re glued. He brought it to me for touch up and repair as the cracks where it had been glued back together are showing.  Some of the cracks are deep and the Nitrocellulose lacquer is shrinking down into the crack and pulling the red color with it creating a darker red deep in the crack. My goal is to drop fill with red tinted lacquer and I mixed to match the red very well. But didn't realize the lacquer would pull the color as it shrank into the crack. Now I have a repair half way finished with red streaks where the deep cracks were. The customer isn't mad or anything, he knows I have not done repairs like this before, but would like to know if it can be re fixed. Any helpful tips and advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Russell Vance]

This is not an uncommon problem - using shader (tinted lacquer) nitro coats to do touch-ups always runs the risk of blending into the existing color and darkening the overall finish in a localised area.  Cracks are obviously one of these occasions/situations. 

Everyone has their own schedule when doing these things - what I do is to stabilize the area to be repaired with clear lacquer - you can always remove a faulty top layer of tinted lacquer from over a clear layer and start again (this is also important when learning to do sunbursts).

So - given that the present repair is no Mona Lisa I would use a cotton bud with thinners on it to clear out the faulty crack areas and then drop fill the cracks with clear, level the area and then shoot color/shader  coats to get the overall finish looking consistent.  Hope this is useful. Rusty.

[Trent Cudd]

I will let my customer know and give it a try. Thank you very much for the info.