Artificially aging pickup covers

[Razor12345]

My 60's reissue Fat Strat sounds great, looks great too; candy apple red with cream colored pearloid pick guard.The only thing that bothered me was a cosmetic issue. The 2 single coil pu covers were an aged cream color. The DiMarzio humbucker was as white as fresh snow. That bugged me! I began researching how to artifically "age" the DiMarzio cover to blend with the 2 single coil covers. Somewhere I read you can mix a concoction of cigarette butts and tea bags. You soak the parts you intend to age in this magic potion for a few days. In the case of a pickup, you can paint the mixture on. I tried this, and painted this disguisting formula on the pickup cover for several days, until the cat jumped on the counter and knocked the bowl containing this mixture to our beautiful new white floor. Bottom line, it worked great on the floor, but not on the pickup cover. Next method I used came off the Seymour Duncan web site. This method is a winner. The solution to my problem....Kiwi brown shoe polish in the round tin. I cleaned the cover and applied the shoe polish. It matched great! It was uniform in color, without streaks, and didn't rub off. You would never know it was shoe polish. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to do this and found another method that works.

 

[abraxas]

Very nice tip Razor! You gave me some ideas there!

Kinman suggests a warm solution of tea, coffee etc, but this is for his own pickup covers only.

The only thing I should recomment is to clean the covers first with some naphtha (Zippo fuel) in order to get rid of the greasy film on their surface.

 

[Tone2TheBone]

I did my set of pickup covers on my Strat with strong boiling hot coffee. Worked great.

 

[elavd]

 

[Tone2TheBone]

This is before the coffee.....

View attachment 495

and this is after.....

View attachment 496

You can tell the difference from the uncoffeefied trem bar tip. That plastic wouldn't take the coffee stain. The stain is permanent and has not faded.

 

[elavd]

AWESOME!!!!

You can tell the difference from the uncoffeefied trem bar tip.

I think that you should coffe-fy it too

 

[Tone2TheBone]

AWESOME!!!!


I think that you should coffe-fy it too

Reread my post my friend. The coffee wouldn't stain the plastic on that tip.

 

[elavd]

Reread my post my friend. The coffee wouldn't stain the plastic on that tip.

Why did this happen?

 

[Tone2TheBone]

Why did this happen?

I think because some plastics are made differently. The plastic on the pickup covers are different you can tell they're softer. The plastic on the trem tip is really hard and shiny. I'm not sure if sanding the tip would help....it might. No biggie though I don't care if the tip is cream or white. I could always buy a cream tip for it....but I haven't.

 

[tremoloman]

Some plastics will work with the shoe polish & coffee method, but some do not. My DiMarzio pickup covers wouldn't work using any method I tried, so I taped them to a window for a few weeks in front of a windowshade to allow additional light to reflect onto it. In a month the difference was what I had hoped for.

I don't recommend leaving them in your car's rear window. I tried this and they melted big time after just 1 day.

 

[Tone2TheBone]

....I don't recommend leaving them in your car's rear window. I tried this and they melted big time after just 1 day.

I can just picture your facial expression when you came upon a set of melted pup covers. I think it would probably look something like this........

 

[SuperSwede]

Tone, do you use regular coffee or do you use coffeine free?

When I worked at a music store I had to get rid of some old nasty stickers from a guitar. We tried with ouzo (which the store keeper apparently had a bottle of in his glove compartment! )... It became very clean, but the smell was so horrible that we couldnt keep it in the store for days...

 

[Tone2TheBone]

Tone, do you use regular coffee or do you use coffeine free?

When I worked at a music store I had to get rid of some old nasty stickers from a guitar. We tried with ouzo (which the store keeper apparently had a bottle of in his glove compartment! )... It became very clean, but the smell was so horrible that we couldnt keep it in the store for days...

SS - The batch of coffee in question was indeed decaf. R

 

[SuperSwede]

The only good use for decaf!

 

[Razor12345]

Thank you all for your great comments and sharing your "pickup aging" experiences and experiments. Isn't it amazing what we will do for our instruments? Got to love it!

 

[Tone2TheBone]

Thank you all for your great comments and sharing your "pickup aging" experiences and experiments. Isn't it amazing what we will do for our instruments? Got to love it!

Tricking stuff out on your guitars is half the fun!