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Sarah had asked me about aging pickguards. you can see some info on you tube on relicing pickguards which is basically beat the crap out of the pickguard. but here's another option. a lot of pickguards are clear coated in nitro. all of semie's mosrite guards were (that I'm aware of), which is why they age the way they do. also modern fender tortoise guards are clear coated in nitro as well. A little while back a customer brought me in his original red 65 fender mustang for a setup. while I did this he asked me to replace the pickguard. check out these pics, whoever guess which guard is the original gets oipunkguy brownie points

Okay, I'll take a guess. I will say that in the first image the original pickguard is the one on the left.

nope!

the pickguard on the right is the original. the only reason he asked me to replace it was because the celluloid top was shrinking and peeling off. you can see it on the right edge of the pickguard. I tried aging this pickguard at first using coffee, but it wouldn't take. so I then mixed some powdered mohawk stain and added a little bit of denatured alcohol and rubbed that into the finish and let it sit for several days. i mixed blue, yellow, and white for that minty look. after wards I rubbed it off and put a tinted nitro clear coat. and then roughed the surface up a little to give the appearance of pick marks.

oipunkguy wrote:the celluloid top was shrinking and peeling off. you can see it on the right edge of the pickguard.

I suppose peeling it off completely and giving it your nitro treatment wasn't an option?
Oh, and I wouldn't have won any Brownie points either! .....

nice aging job. Another tip to spot a vintage Fender pickguard - the bevel angle is greater. Notice how the black band on the pickguard on the right is thicker than the one on the left? It's not due to thickness, it's the wider angle. I forget what the exact angle is, but if a new guard is 45 degrees, the old ones are more like 60.

MWaldorf wrote:nice aging job. Another tip to spot a vintage Fender pickguard - the bevel angle is greater. Notice how the black band on the pickguard on the right is thicker than the one on the left? It's not due to thickness, it's the wider angle. I forget what the exact angle is, but if a new guard is 45 degrees, the old ones are more like 60.

Eagle eye!

I suppose peeling it off completely and giving it your nitro treatment wasn't an option?

hey paul, you probably can't tell from the picture, but the celluloid section had already chips off a little and after the customer and I talked we both went with the option to do a new guard, and he would keep the original one save somewhere to prevent it from falling apart any more then it already had. after all, he bought the guitar almost brand new
good eye mel, which goes to show you, even reissues are often times not dead one to the original.

mel, do u know if the older guards were cut like this originally? or would it be just aging of the pickguard?

I've checked a few Mosrite pickguards and they look like 60 degrees to me. Can anyone else verify?