P'Wag
Yeah, typically in a factory finish the whole guitar gets the sunburst, then the binding is scraped clear of color, then the whole guitar gets clear coats.
Sometimes there will be a sealer coat of clear under the burst, but sometimes the color goes on to the bare wood.
Also, sometimes you'll see that the binding was masked instead of scraped - but this is a little unusual on a factory production finish.
The only area of bare binding is usually along the fretted edge of the FB.
The idea of playing with the binding behind the tailpiece or the pickguard bracket is that you can test on areas that will be hidden when you are finished.
Unfortunately, just re-finishing the binding can be tricky to say the least. The bump between the re-finished binding and the original finish body will be hard to stabilize. Nitro shrinks for a looong time. A thicker nitro finish can take a year or more to really settle down to a finial thickness.
A binding-only re-finish is do-able, but should involve alot of waiting before the final rubout. (2 minute penalty for three hyphens in one sentence.)
This is hard to describe, but if there is overspray onto the original finish on the body, the old finish will swell with the solvent from the new finish. If you do not wait for the old finish to shrink back down before sanding, then what looks to be level after a week, will turn into a sunken area after several months.
This has hilarious consequences in a nitro touch-up. You can keep spraying and sanding a non-level area and have the problem get worse (over time) with each fix. It looks as if the more finish you add, the deeper the hole gets,...
This is not what is really happening though. The more finish you add, the more swollen the underlying finish gets. If you wait many weeks to sand, you do get a buildup of new finish. But if you sand after a day or two, you sand away all the new finish and even down into the now-swollen old finish. Then after a few weeks (or months) the old deep area can be deeper that before you "fixed" it.
Don't ask how I learned this - the emotional scars linger after 30 years,...
AND, filling a finish crack with nitro can be truly impossible. Sometimes if you fill a crack with nitro, the old finish on each side of the crack swells. This squeezes the new finish out of the crack - but all looks great - so you head upsatairs and have a Sam Adams Black Lager.
After a week (or month) or two, the old finish shrinks back down and the crack is back.
This is why such cracks are often better filled with the ancient hot-melt lacquer sticks - or (if you can stand the leap into the 1970's) cyanoacrylate. Just becareful with the CA. Thin CA can melt the nitro - not a bad thing if done under control, but a disaster if it gets crazy.
CP
