Mine the Harvest

A couple weeks back my guitar received a healthy buckle rash during a jam session. It happens.

The back had about an 8″ diameter area that was scratched pretty badly. While none of the scratches were deep enough to go all the way through the finish they were cringingly bad.

The sad state of affairs was remedied completely by a miracle product to which I give a resoundingly awesome, five star review: Guitar Scratch Remover

Before and after pictures were very challenging given the high gloss, dark color of my guitar, available lighting and a cheesy camera. The pictures did neither justice to the agony of the scratches nor the brilliance of the result. Suffice it to say it was like this:

Before: Oh man. Cringe. That sucks. Buddhistic thoughts of the transient nature of life, impermanence and perils of attachment. I should just accept them with pride as battle scars on the axe – which might be easier had I been the one to scratch it. I wonder if there is any scratch remover that would work (huge doubt). Walk away.

After: OMFG! This stuff is magic, alien reverse engineered, nanotechnology marvel of materials science. The scratches are GONE. Not better. You can’ tell – at all. Hell, I can’t tell. Holy cow.

Of course Google and Amazon reviews lead me instantly to Guitar Scratch Remover, but my skeptical nature did not leave much room for hope. Sure, it looked good. Silicon free. Great reviews. Still, every “scratch remover” I’ve used has been little more that a polish and hardly removed anything. And given the finish and depth of these clearly there was no hope. But hey – why not risk $20? Everyone seems to rave about this stuff.

And rightly so. I started right off with the blue compound and applied some pretty serious elbow grease. After the first application there were immediate and excellent results, I’d say an 80% improvement. If that had been it, I would have considered it a success. I could not expect more. Three more applications and the scratches were utterly gone. Amazing. I then used one application of the red compound which restored the high gloss shine and blended everything out. You could not have asked for a better end result.

This stuff really works. Read and apply the directions exactly and put some force into buffing it. Also note that while safe for nearly all high gloss finishes there are some guitars (Rickenbacker, etc.) you should contact them about first to be sure.  The $20 players kit contains plenty of both compounds, you will have lots left for future scratch maintenance.