Official Luthiers Forum!

I expect this will be a lively discussion. I’m going to throw it all out there. As a semi pro builder, I have tried Entech, Enduro Var, Nitro. That’s not an expansive sampling. But it’s a popular one. I have had a few examples in waterborne that were stellar. I’ve never had a nitro that failed. My recent experience with Enduro Var have led me to punt on waterborne.

I believe the main reason home builders use it or Emtech is safety. Sure, nitro can be a fire hazard. But how many of u have actually sprayed it? Nitros ease of use and easy repair make it ideal. None of the waterbornes are repairable in the same sense. On top of it all, waterbornes are more expensive.

Learn how to spray nitro safely. No big deal. I’m done with waterborne. That is, until regulations come along and ban nitro. Blah

Not me.



How do you mean, in the same sense?

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

My ultimate complaint is repairability. U can’t fix waterborne.

Target EM6000 is fixable, even years later as a sprayed coat will burn into the previous coats. Nitro is easier and more forgiving. Concerning Nitro I dislike the month of off gassing more than actually spraying it. I have a spray booth with an explosion proof fan so I can spray it safely.

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http://www.Harvestmoonguitars.com

I've had a number of opportunities to fix EM6000 and it was no problem. Completely invisible repairs. I can't speak for other water borne lacquers though.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

I’ll toss a grenade back: why spray? Maybe some waterborne you have to spray, but others you don’t. You don’t have to spray Enduro Var. Heck, maybe you shouldn’t, if it doesn’t work well. Brushing it is fairly easy.

I brush too. That's one of the attractions of EM6000 for me. You can produce a really nice finish with no spray booth, no exhaust fan, no spray gun, no compressor, without having to wear a respirator, and with a very small $ investment.

The one disadvantage that brushing has versus spraying, as I see it, is that each coat goes on very thin so it takes quite a few more total coats to get enough build. The wet film thickness of a brushed on coat as I do it is less than 1 mil. If I actually try to put it on heavy, I can get it just up to 2 mil.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

I have built and finished 25 guitars now. A couple of them were gun stock oil, that was fine for what I wanted but I'm certainly not going to use it on a nice guitar. Everything else was either solvent or water born lacquers. I don't have a real spray booth so solvent lacquer was somewhat problematic, so I tried a couple of the early water born lacquers. First was whatever StewMac was selling under their brand name ten or so years ago. That was followed by the one the LMII had been selling for a long time, KTM-9.

I love the non toxic, easy to clean convenience of KTM-9. I didn't like the bluish cast but a tiny drop of amber dye seemed to kill that. What I hated was witness lines - it seemed like have the times I would sand a guitar it looked like a topographic map with little circles all over the place.

The few guitars that I built for paying customers, given a choice, they all asked for nitro. My last three or four or five personal guitars have all been nitro. I know I should try some of the other finishes, EM6000 specifically, but I'm so happy with the results of nitro that I can't bring myself to experiment.

Don't mistake waterborne as being non toxic...

I've always used Mohawk nitro with their vinyl sealer.

Getting close to finishing my last gallon so I'm looking at water based mainly because of the reduced (or eliminated?) off gassing. I always joke that I can spray a guitar in my garage. Let it sit for 48 hours before bringing it in the house & it still sinks up the house.

I spoke with a local builder who's been at it a long time & he loves EM6000 - says it melts into previous layers & is repairable just like nitro but without the stench.

Any EM6000 users want to chine in?

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I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

So, I’m just a hobbyist hack, but I’ve thought about the finish question a lot here lately. I think there are six relevant questions to ask for every specific finish possibility:

1. How will this make the guitar look?
2. How will this make the guitar feel?
3. How will this make the guitar sound?
4. How will buyers react to the IDEA of this? Some buyers will only accept certain things, regardless of the reality of how the guitar looks, feels, and sounds.
5. How will this affect the durability, and ability to be repaired, of the guitar?
6. What is the TOTAL cost of putting this on the guitar? Not just the cost of the material, but also the special equipment and/or facilities needed, the total work hours needed, the health costs and risks, and any environmental costs and risks.

If you are not dealing with buyers who will only accept one thing, I think the biggest differences between the various choices show up with questions 5 and 6. And for somebody like me, who is not set up to safely spray anything, much less nitro, a modern finish that can be brushed is a great choice.

I’m moving that way after French Polishing everything up until now. It took some soul searching, but I have come to the conclusion that I will overall be happier with a modern brushed finish. I will get more 5 for less 6, to use the above framework. To each her/his own.

For EM6000 at least, while you would not treat it as non-toxic and you would want to wear a respirator if spraying, its components are all considered to be of low toxicity and the components that could be inhaled due to volatility are present in much lower amounts than the volatile organic solvents present in nitrocelullose lacquer. According to the SDS sheet, EM6000 has a toxicity rating of 1 on a scale of 0 to 4 with 1 indicating "slight" toxicity. The ingredients of interest are acrylic copolymer resin (30%), dipropylene glycol monomethyl ether (5% max), and propylene glycol monomethyl ether (5% max) all of which are classified as being low toxicity. Note that the organic solvents make up no more than 10% of the total volume. Volatile organic solvents constitute ~94% of Cardinal nitrocelluose lacquer which has a toxicity rating of 2 on the 0 to 4 toxicity scale corresponding to "moderate" toxicity.

From the EM6000 SDS sheet:

None of the ingredients in this product meet the definition of “Hazardous Chemical” given in the OSHA Hazard Communication Regulation 29CFR 1910.120 (C)

Does not meet the criteria of a hazardous waste as defined under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) 40 CFR 261.

As finishes go, it's relatively benign.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

for sure compared to solvent based, but as you note, PPE is still required. I just don't want people to think they can be cavalier in their attitude towards safety protocols just cause it's waterbased...

You didn't mention the high concentration of dihydrogen oxide usually present in water based finishes...something to be aware of.

Nasty stuff that dihydrogen oxide .

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

We have not run into any issues drop-filling or touching up Enduro-Var, beyond the three weeks needed for the finish to fully cross-link before sanding and buff-out. Yes - prep work requires the older finish to be mechanically toothed once much over a few hours has passed since original application, but that is no different than the prep work we do on older nitro surfaces, and especially when we suspect a pre-cat or post-cat nitro was used.

Our biggest complaint with the finish is that it is close to impossible to chemically strip it without using very aggressive, very toxic epoxy paint removers (I will spare the reader another rant about the availability of methylene chloride-based strippers). Incredibly tough finish that, if dry-sanded after touch-ups, does not show witness lines or other evidence of the work when buffed.

As already mentioned, brushing requires significantly more coats be applied versus spraying to build film thickness to the desired value, but the process is miserly in the degree of wasted finish generated, and best done with inexpensive, readily available, reusable poly-foam brushes. A quart of finish is more than enough material for a guitar if brush-applied.

There is a steep learning curve for Enduro-Var, but we have not found another finish that looks and feels as much like nitro, but resists low-pH perspiration, bug spray, and other destroyers of nitrocellulose finishes.

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For the times they are a changin'

- Bob Dylan

Woodie, I'm convinced. Enduro-Var will be my next finish. Thanks for this informative input.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

I gave up on waterborn finishes probably 15 years ago. I really wanted it to work but it was just too unpredictable. I used KTM and a Stew Mac finish which I actually liked better. I tried other ones too. Some guitars came out fantastic, others were terrible and I used the same methods every time. So I didn't get it. The last straw for me was when a client brought a guitar back that was maybe 5 years old and the finish looked terrible.

So I've been waiting for the water base finishes to improve and it sounds like maybe they have. In the mean time for me it's mostly FP now, oil based varnish or Nitro. Oh and Royal Lac is promising too.

I would not hesitate to use Tru-Oil again either even on a fine guitar. IMHO it's a very good looking finish and easy to apply. I put it off as an amateur finish too becasue for some reason it has that reputation. That is till I started seeing some examples of guitars finished with it so I tried it myself and was quite pleased with it.

I saw this image in a facebook group for guitar builders in Taiwan...



His conclusion is, waterbased finish suck no matter what he does. He says not only does it not buff at all, but the finish itself is just not durable, and the act of installing tuners on the headstock ruined it.

Nitro will never be banned in Taiwan, and even if it is, they are lazily enforced... (R22 freon is supposed to be illegal but people use it like crazy and they release the stuff like there's no tomorrow when servicing AC's)

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

I have developed the opinion (informed or ill-informed, you decide) that the people who have the hardest time embracing waterborne finishes are the people who went to the trouble of learning how to spray nitro well, and were satisfied with the process and the end result, but now feel pressure to change. I think that, in general, they want any other finish material to be a plug-in replacement for nitro in all aspects. That would be awesome from their perspective, but there is probably nothing out there that will meet that expectation. A different material is going to require a different process, and it is going to have some different attributes. A different mix of bad and good.

I never was hot on the idea of spraying, and I for sure never wanted to deal with nitro, so I have less of a prior investment that must be disrupted in order to work with waterborne finishes.

That reminds me of one of my waterborne disasters. It was a similar adhesion problem and I could literally peel off the finish like an onion. It made refinishing it easy though.

I really like this framework. Thankfully I tried spraying chemically cured polyester on my first guitar, so everything has been comparatively simple since.

I don't spray nitro in an environmentally safe way, and the part of me that winces when I can't recycle an aluminum can cries out in pain every time. I did a few test panels a few years ago comparing EnduroVar, french polished shellac, and nitro. Without a doubt the nitro looks the best to me. I found that it refracted the light in a way the Enduro or Shellac couldn't and draws out the reds and pinks, which I like. However, I liked everything else about EnduroVar. It flowed out incredibly easily; obviously the low environmental impact is a huge plus; and I've never worked with a finish that sanded so easily. I found it incredibly easy to brush.

This is a link to my test panel images. Cardinal lacquer is in the middle, with shellac and EnduroVar on either side. You can tell which is EnduroVar because it has the darker tint.

Test panels

Well, when we see a car maker spray waterbased finish on a car, and it doesn't look like it's been left alone since the 1950s after a year, then we'll figure out what they use and go with that...

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

I have very little experience with finishing. I tried spraying in my garage, but with a compressor that's too small, and a space that's full of dust and gets used by everyone in the house I found the learning curve to be too steep to be worth it. For film finishes I had tried spraying a few different products but what I've settled on now is a waterborne finish called Brite-tone made by crystalac. I can't speak to the quality versus other products, but I can say that I can brush it on in my shop which is in my basement, and which I also teach 40 or so guitar students every week. There are no negative fumes to speak of, so I'm not gassing out my family or my students. That's a pretty big plus for me.

Rick Turner once said “the primary ingredient in waterborne finishes is wishful thinking”. Lol

I continue to be amazed at how people continue to put up posts in various forums citing one person's poor experience with some unspecified water borne finish which leads them to conclude that ALL water borne finishes suck. IMO, their critical thinking skills suck.

Water borne finishes differ so much from each other that in some cases they have no components in common other than the water which serves as a carrier. EM6000 and KTM9, for example, are completely different finishes chemically. It makes absolutely no sense to generalize across all water borne finishes based on an experience with just one of them. That should be a big .

The other type of post that continues to come up is from guys who tried a single water borne finish 15+ years ago, had an unsatisfactory experience, and ever since have posted that water borne finishes suck to this day. There are a couple guys over on the AGF that are really bad about this even after having it brought to their attention. Real stick in the mud types.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter