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Post subject: How to Whitening(or Retrieve) Maple Neck?
Posted: Thu May 15, 2014 8:33 pm
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My neck was kinda fade out. I hate darken neck. You saw it mostly in relic or 60s guitar on keybord. Most people like it but i definetly hate it. Why does it happen? How can i retrieve orginal color of my neck?
I searched in net but i haven't find helpful solutions. Thanks!


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Post subject: Re: How to Whitening(or Retrieve) Maple Neck?
Posted: Thu May 15, 2014 9:51 pm
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Joined: Wed Mar 31, 2010 12:48 am
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The color shift is due to a combination of aging and airborne contaminants which attack the clear topcoat. Save for removing the frets and sanding the finish off all the way down to the substrate maple then refinishing, there's really no practical method to restore the lumber to its natural pigment.

It's called "mojo".

Arjay

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Post subject: Re: How to Whitening(or Retrieve) Maple Neck?
Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 3:29 am
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Retroverbial wrote:
...and sanding the finish off all the way down to the substrate maple...

Hi darkdream: as always, our esteemed colleague Arjay has put his finger on a crucial point. It is not just the lacquer that will have yellowed over time but the wood underneath as well.

Here's an amusing comparison that illustrates the point. This is a maple violin back I was making - very slowly. I roughed out the arching and then left it untouched for about 10 months. In this photo I've just returned to it and begun the process of fine shaping it. You can see my fresh gouge marks very clearly because the wood I'm taking off is already so much darker than the timber underneath. And that's after just 10 months sitting around in a fairly dimly lit room:

Image

That's how much maple darkens in less than a year.

There are two reasons for this. One is oxidisation of minerals in the timber where it is exposed to air. The other is the UV in sunlight causing the cellulose in the wood fibres to turn yellow. Violin makers often like to leave a finished instrument hanging in a sunny window for a couple of months prior to varnishing, precisely to take the whiteness off it: others put them in specially constructed UV cabinets to achieve the same thing faster.

The lacquer on your maple guitar neck will have done a lot to protect the wood from oxidisation, so if you sand the finish off you will find the timber a bit paler than it looks at the moment. However, UV will have darkened it somewhat. There is nothing you can do about that unless, as Arjay says, you actually sand off the top half mil or so of wood. And we'd strongly recommend against doing that.

Very pale maple guitar necks are a bit unfashionable at the moment and for the last six years Fender have been slightly tinting the lacquer on their American Standard guitars to give them a darker look. Like you, I happen to share a pleasure in a really milky white Strat neck - it's one of the features I really liked about my 2005 Am Std back when I dragged it out the store. But pale necks will darken over time: there's nothing we can do about it. We must simply learn to love our babies for who they are now, not who they used to be.

If it's any consolation, if it's more than six years old I bet your neck is still whiter than one that's new in the shops right now.

Cheers - C

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