Removing paint from an Ibanez bass

[whanbury]

I'm left handed and buying a left handed Ibanez from eBay. It's not a critical piece of equipment, a bass that I can gig with that will take a beating. I want to remove the finish and either stain it dark walnut or natural. I understand that the finishes can be tough to remove? I also heard there's a gel that you can put on the paint job and it will melt the paint off and you just wipe the residue off.
My rant for today: Why is it that guitar companies think the only color we want is BLACK?!? I am so sick of looking for left handed instruments in every design but only black--like the Ford Model T!
Thanks, Will

[62bass]

Originally Posted by whanbury

I'm left handed and buying a left handed Ibanez from eBay. It's not a critical piece of equipment, a bass that I can gig with that will take a beating. I want to remove the finish and either stain it dark walnut or natural. I understand that the finishes can be tough to remove? I also heard there's a gel that you can put on the paint job and it will melt the paint off and you just wipe the residue off.
My rant for today: Why is it that guitar companies think the only color we want is BLACK?!? I am so sick of looking for left handed instruments in every design but only black--like the Ford Model T!
Thanks, Will

The factory finishes are very resistant to paint strippers. Once in a while someone here says they have used a special stripper made for that purpose and it worked. But the stuff you find in paintt stores and hardware stores won't even dull the finish. So forget that. I've done a lot of paint and varnish stripping for many years. I've also had the dubious pleasure of removing a few factory finishes. What I find works best and quickest is to melt the stuff off with a heat gun (about $30) and a flexible putty knife and then sand the rest starting with coarse grit (about 40 grit) and once everything including the clear sealer undercoat is off, sanding up finer and finer to 220 grit.

Then you're ready to start applying stain and clear top coats.

But the wood underneath is not likely to be very nice to finish with a stain and clear finish and will probably have been made from several mismatched pieces. That's why it's covered in paint.

[whanbury]

Thanks 62bass! I think I'll keep looking for a clear bass instead!

[MadMan118]

Originally Posted by 62bass

But the wood underneath is not likely to be very nice to finish with a stain and clear finish and will probably have been made from several mismatched pieces. That's why it's covered in paint.

Yeah I've had this happen to me before

[62bass]

I lucked out when I refinished my 78 P bass. It was a factory "white" finish that had yellowed, was chipped and scratched and generally looked like a wino's teeth. When I got all that gunk off I discovered it was a 3 piece ash body and the pieces were actually better matched than many clear finished Fenders I've seen. But that's not the norm. I don't know how mine made it through the assembly line at Fender and got a paint finish.

[atheos]

Yeah, the worst matched bodies get completely painted over, middle-class ends up sunburst and the best of the best will be natural or transparent

[62bass]

Originally Posted by whanbury

Thanks 62bass! I think I'll keep looking for a clear bass instead!

Good idea. Even for a left hander there will be some around used and in good shape. Good gear is going really cheap these days.

[toobalicious]

i dunno... paint doesnt guarantee an ugly wood underneath. one (of many) instruments that i have stripped was an ibanez SR400. the original color was like a candy purple . once i got through the insanely thick, multi-layered finish, i discovered that the wood was quite attractive (as cheap basses go), and that the sealer coat was still perfectly intact. a little finish sanding and tinted lacquer made it look awesome, IMO. *and* the tone opened up substantially. i always felt that the bass was kind of ho-hum and choked sounding. even though there are people who will tell me i am retarded to believe it, i am convinced that taking the finish off warmed it up a lot.

like everything, YMMV.

[62bass]

There are always going to be exceptions. I'm glad yours worked out well.

[whanbury]

So toobalicious, how did you get the paint off?

[mrbeezroom]

You might want to check out this website. They sell guitar refinishing products plus there is a ton of "How To" resources. I stripped and refinished a bass using their products and advice and it turned out pretty well. If the wood underneath is mismatched, you can choose from many solid paint colors, including black. I used a Fender Lake Placid Blue that is really nice. Good Luck!


http://home.flash.net/~guitars/index.html

[toobalicious]

Originally Posted by whanbury

So toobalicious, how did you get the paint off?

hi. sorry i didnt see this before now.

i *think* i used a product called strypeze (spelling?) on that bass. however, it wont *touch* fender poly, FWIW. upon discovering this, i was introduced to "aircraft coating remover", and i think the brand is tal-strip or something like that. it is available at your local auto parts store. that stuff is super-duper and acts very quickly. like 10-20 minutes. the strypeze took several applications (with the requisite several hour wait) with scraping (with a PLASTIC scraper) in between. if i knew then what i know now, i wouldve used the aircraft stuff. pm me if youd like to get a little more specific.

[whanbury]

Thanks everyone! :-)

[Bruce Johnson]

When I do restorations, I always manually scrape off the paint, followed by light hand sanding. I've found that it does the least damage to the wood. When I used paint strippers in the past, there was too much chance of little bits of stripper residue getting trapped or soaked into a corner somewhere. After doing all the work of painting, I'd find spots that popped up or didn't adhere properly. I stopped using strippers after that.

Mechanical scraping doesn't take as long as you'd think. With a little practice, you can peel the paint off in long strips, barely scratching the wood. Even an instrument as complex as an Ampeg Scroll Bass takes me about 2-3 hours to take it down to the bare wood. That's less than it would take to do it with chemicals, particularly when you consider all of the washdown, cleanup, and drying needed.

A scraper tuned for stripping paint is different than one for scraping wood. A paint scraper is dull by woodworking standards. It's ground to a bevel, but the edge isn't honed razor sharp. And you don't want to burnish and turn the micro-edge, like you do on a wood scraper. A good paint scraper fractures the paint and breaks it away from the wood, without digging into the wood. You hold it approximately perpendicular to the surface, press it lightly into the paint, then drag it. As I said, it takes a little practice, but it isn't hard. I have a bunch of different paint scrapers that I use. Some are the blades from commercial scrapers that I've reground. Others are custom shapes that I've made from tool steel flat stock. Most of them are fairly small and I hold the blade directly in my hand. For me, scrapers mounted on the ends of long handles are too hard to control.

If you look at paint scrapers in the paint section of the hardware store, there are many kinds. Look for the kind with shaped steel blades that attach to the end of a handle, then just buy a pack of the replacement blades. There's often a triangular blade and a French Curve shaped blade. They also sell scrapers with carbide inserts, but I've never gotten good results with the carbide blades. The grind angle is wrong and they just don't seem to peel the paint. Maybe for taking latex off a window frame, but not for taking polyester off of a bass neck. Stay with steel blades. If all else fails, a slightly dulled blade from a box cutter type knife will do a pretty good job too.

As was mentioned above, when you scrape and sand the finish off a modern instrument, you don't have bare wood. The sealer coats that were applied have soaked down into the grain, and can't be removed without sanding off some significant wood. It'll be in there particularly deep in the end grain. So, trying to stain the wood and wipe on some thin "oil" finish is probably going to give you patchy, uneven results.

If you want to put a "natural" finish on to a previously painted instrument, it's better to do it with a tinted satin finish. That is, spray on a couple of thin clear base coats and level-sand them. Then spray on a lightly tinted color coat to get the shade that you want. Follow that with several clear coats to protect the color coat. Then gently steel wool the clear coats to get the silky satin look and feel.