What is my finish? Made in Japan Sam Ash Soloist (first post)

[Johnnyu71]

Hello all.
This is my first post.

I've had this Sam Ash exclusive version of the soloist for about 10 years now and i just chipped a piece of the finish off the body.

Does anyone know what type of finish it is? Is it polyurethane? Is it a nitro finish? Lacquer? I'd like to know so i can research on how to fix it on my own if possible.

Here are the specs and a photo below (guitar on the right, obviously LOL). I'll add a pic of the actual chipped guitar shortly.

Specs:
This version of the Soloist adds several enhancements to the mix like contour cutaways, neck thru construction for singing sustain, and genuine Seymour Duncans for that hard rocking tone. And the attractive Trans Blue finish makes you look that much better on stage! Features include an alder body with a flame maple top, hard maple neck, rosewood fingerboard with sharkfin inlays, a JB humbucker at the bridge and a '59 at the neck, and a Floyd Rose Standard tremolo. It's then topped off with ivoroid binding and black hardware.

Alder Body, Flame Maple Top
Hard Maple Neck
Rosewood Fingerboard
Sharkfin Inlays
Ivoroid Binding - Neck & H/S
Floyd Rose "Standard" Tremolo
2 Humbuckers: Duncan JB and '59
Black Hardware
25.5" scale
Volume and Tone knobs with 3-way switch

[Number Of The Priest]

Your guitar is almost certainly poly-finished.

Laziest way: Enjoy the guitar with the cosmetic damage.

Easiest repair: Do you still have the little piece that you chipped off? I'd glue that back on and blend it to hide (as best as you can) the damage. More on blending below.

Most effort, especially if you lost the little piece that you chipped off: Learn drop-fill finish repairs and blending.

Here's a quintessential video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTVScFJoe24

Another one that helped me when I started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jJO_yQPNU8

I also watched plenty of car paint/finish repair videos. All the principles and the workflow are all the same.

It depends on the size of the chip. Since your original post isn't showing closeup photos of the chip, I can't make any personal recommendations, although the general guidelines/workflow is below. If you can get your damage photos to work, I might be able to suggest a remedy. Over the past several months, I experimented with and learned drop-filling and blending on two different test guitars using a variety of materials but the same procedure is almost always followed (as per the Stewart-MacDonald video I linked above:

1) Color-matched paint. I've used automotive touch-up paint pens and I've used bottles of nail polish. I find nail polish "runs" into the wound a little bit easier (but as a consequence you need to be more careful applying it conservatively). I've also seen guys use paint meant for art or possibly enamel paints meant for scale models. It probably doesn't matter since the goal is simply color at this stage. Solid color guitars are easiest to color-match. Metallic/flake finishes will be more challenging to find a matching paint or nail polish. Graphics and transparent finishes... enjoy the challenge.

2) Clearcoat. This is to protect the color layer from Step 1 above. I've used super glue (cyanoacrylate), nail polish clearcoat, and the clearcoat that comes with automotive touch-up paint pens. I found nail polish clearcoat the easiest to use and I could even leave the repair alone after this stage if I didn't want to blend it (more about blending below). Maybe I wasn't using the right super glue because I was not sold on Stewart-MacDonald's preference for super glue as a clearcoat. I found that super glue made the color layer hazy and more work to blend in the subsequent steps.

Blending: The idea is graduating from more abrasive products to finer and finer products. You'll see below a progression from rougher grits of sandpaper to fine micro mesh paper, to liquidy lightly-ablative products like compound and polish.

3) Wet-sanding (blending part 1). The Stewart-MacDonald video above recommends starting with 400 grit wet-dry sandpaper, but I found this too rough for the delicate wound repair I've done up to this point. Even 600 and 800 grit were too violent. Even with 1000 grit, I was still occasionally eating through my repaired wound, forcing me to start over. All I'm doing is trying to do final leveling of the wound and somehow I can undo all my hard work if I am not careful. So I used 1000, 1500, 2000, and 3000 grit and went very carefully. I followed up with 6000 and 12,000 grit wet-dry micro mesh paper. (Micro mesh grits are not equivalent to sandpaper grits.)

4) Compound and polish (blending part 2). At this point the wound will have graduated from being a "scab" to more of a "scar". Use automotive compound (example: I like Meguiar's Ultimate Compound) to remove the fine scratches left behind by the 12,000 grit wet-dry micro mesh paper. Then use automotive polish (example: I like Meguiar's Ultimate Polish) to remove ultrafine scratches that the compound may have left behind. You can compound and/or polish the whole guitar body if you want. The Stewart-MacDonald video I linked recommends a medium paste-based polishing compound, and I used Turtle Wax Renew Rx Polishing Compound, but I found it messy and preferred the Meguiar's liquid products instead. Though, results were very similar between the Turtle Wax and the Meguiar's, with a very satisfying deep reflective shine.

5) Optional: Apply automotive wax (example: 100% carnauba wax) to protect the bare finish. Go nuts and wax the whole guitar body if you want.

[Johnnyu71]

man that is a lot of great information.

Thank you you so much.

Here is is the chip. No piece actually fell off. More so, it got crunched
like a shell of a hard boiled egg

[Number Of The Priest]

No problem. OK my instructions are going to be overkill for an indentation the way you're describing it. GluBoost has a line of [very expensive but seemingly miraculous] cyanoacrylate-based products and I've seen Youtube videos (and there are a lot of GluBoost repair videos on Youtube) where they simply mix up their powdered dye with their fill/finish liquid and then use that as a "catch all magic formula" to repair nearly everything, then wet-sand to blend, and buff out. I haven't repaired an indentation using my cheaper products and techniques I described in my previous post; I've only repaired wounds where the damage was down to the wood and paint color was missing.

For dents in a neck, I've heard of people steaming the dent (hot soldering iron wrapped with a wet cloth) to lift the wound back to level. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmZUSne426A. Lots of other Youtube videos describe the procedure in more detail but I haven't checked to see if anyone has ever steamed dents on bodies with paint on them. Maybe worth investigating. Once the dent is steamed back up to level, could potentially just blend (wet-sanding, wet-micro-meshing, compounding, polishing). I haven't ever steamed anything, so I'm purely extrapolating what I would try if I encountered your situation.

Again, would need to see photos of your dent before proposing a possible solution.

Looks like you're trying to hotlink a photo that you perhaps uploaded to the Marshall Forum? If so, it's likely that guests on the Marshall Forum cannot view attachments, so hence why you cannot hotlink the attachment here to JCF.

I highly recommend you host your images externally through a third party image hosting service. Choose a free image host (https://www.google.ca/search?newwind...4dUDCAc&uact=5), upload your photos there, copy the generated image links, and paste those links back here on the forum in your next reply.

[DonP]

I have that same guitar. When they first came out in 2007 I was like "meh", no MOP inlays? No Ebony? So I didn't pick one up until 2013. But now I love mine. It's special because all of my J/C archtops are 24.75" scale. This one is 25.5"

I'm still running the stock pickups. The JB sounds really good in the bridge. The 59 is great in the neck.