The Les Paul repair reaches the finish line. In the series finale, Ian walks the whole color recovery on camera and in photos: iron-oxide-black pore fill, the naphtha trick that separates specular from diffuse reflection so you judge finish instead of light, test boards that earn the right to touch the guitar, and the dye-over-pigment order of operations that keeps the strata predictable — plus what to do when you overshoot black (archaeology, not solvents). Then the endgame nobody shows: forcing the sink-back in a sunny window, re-clearing, foam-block leveling over compound curvature, cutting checks with the back of a blade held wrong on purpose, re-darkening compound-whitened checks with Lockwood dye, and a dead-flat-in-retarder “magic dirt” mist that ages the repair into the guitar. Borderline invisible in sunlight, $1,500 on the invoice, and the anchors stay — all risk, no reward.
Aired on Looth Group Live, 2026.
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Transcript lightly edited for readability — filler and crosstalk trimmed, product and proper-name spellings corrected. Audience questions attributed where the dialogue makes the asker clear.
00:07 — Recap
Ian Davlin: Last time on this guitar I showed the piece of plexiglass we bent with heat to contour the top, so the sanding block conformed while we leveled all the little spots. Then pore filler — mahogany needs it or you’ll be going forever, even under pigment — and I wanted something in line with what might have been used on a guitar like this. From the test boards last session, I’d settled on liking the iron oxide black as the base, so a little of it went into the pore fill to kick off the festivities. A lot of this is hard to show live — every attempt I’ve made at filming airbrushing with a phone is less expository than pictures — so we’ll walk the photos.
01:32 — Naphtha vision
Ian: You’ll see a lot of wet shots: that’s naphtha. Wiping it on normalizes sheen and color so I can see past the checking and the sheen mismatch of the original lacquer, down to what’s actually happening underneath. Technical jargon moment: specular versus diffuse reflection. Specular is the light source bouncing straight back — the extreme case is the patch that’s basically a mirror of my light. Diffuse is why one area reads lighter than another when the color underneath is identical. If you’re judging touch-up color without normalizing the surface, you’re reading the reflection, not the finish. (And that one mystery patch of shiny black? The reflection of a missing ceiling tile above the bench. Take all of that into consideration.) The naphtha also showed me a crease I wasn’t happy with — bare-wood sanding hides that stuff even under raking light — so back it went to the block.
On soaking a paper towel in naphtha bare-handed: the question to ask yourself when handling this stuff is — how long do you really want to live? If the answer is forever, maybe wear a glove. Just don’t wear the gloves with the fingers cut off.
06:44 — Trust the process
Ian: Here’s the pore fill, then the iron-oxide-black pigment coat sprayed in lacquer — and next to it the swatch from last session: iron oxide black, black dye shot over it, yellow dye over that. The project at this stage is still half a hundred miles from the target — and the swatch is what buys the nerve to keep going. If I were spitballing on the guitar with no test boards, I’d be looking at this going “that’s not even close” and doing all my testing on the instrument. Get something 90% of the way there before you start anointing the instrument. And move your test piece around in the angles — we’ve all done touch-ups that look good in one angle and like crap in another; audition the swatch the same way.
09:24 — Building the black
Ian: Now the black dye goes over the pigment, and the black arrives fast — dye builds really fast, and if you overshoot there’s no “more black than black” to save you. Material theory: pigment is a particulate; dye lives in solution. Spray pigment over dye and the particulate sinks while the dye floats — an unpredictable strata of color. There are mitigations — very fast solvents, a little pigment to tune — but in general you bring it up slowly, in the right order. The method: pigment layer, a coat of lacquer over it, then very dilute ColorTone black dye in StewMac retarder, misted on. It matters that it’s the StewMac retarder — it’s not aggressive; an aggressive one would damage the lacquer at these quantities. Guitar in one hand under a very strong light, airbrush in the other: wet the area with naphtha or a mist of retarder, get a good look at where the black actually needs to go, puff the air to flash it off, then shoot exactly there. Willy-nilly it — “eh, it’s black, how much more black could it be?” — and you’re cruising for a bruising.
14:00 — Pigment theory
Dan (asking): Is the iron oxide a powdered pigment? It reads gray-black.
Ian: It is, and it is — and in hindsight I’d have done something smarter than straight powder into lacquer; Blendal powders can work for this, though Blendal’s black is even grayer — more light in it. But here’s the thing: I didn’t get uptight about how black the pigment was, because even with the exact matching pigment, stacking pigment on pigment always leaves a fuzzy line where one concentration tapers into the other. It’s like trying to spot-touch satin with satin — you always end up with a sheen edge unless you take the whole surface. So the plan was always to fudge that line afterward with dyes. The pigment gets you the value neighborhood; the dyes do the diplomacy.
17:08 — Commandeering the area
Ian: I tried to be slick and confine the touch-up, keeping a couple of compression spots as eye-distracting legacy dings. It didn’t read right — it looked like something had been there and was now partially gone. So I commandeered the whole area and took it over. Sometimes the honest move is the bigger footprint.
18:08 — Yellow in, hard light on
Ian: The yellow starts going in, and everything you’re seeing is under one of those ultra-high-intensity garage lights — that’s the standard I touched it up under. As it stands, the repair holds up in bright sunlight — I took it outside recently — and it’s borderline invisible in bright indoor light. Same color can read as two colors purely from the angle of the light and a slight sheen difference, so the loop is: wipe down, look, hit this little area with a little yellow, move, look again. Then the photos in normal light, then hard light at high gloss, then after cutting a couple of checks into it — and in the window in the sun, as Amy Grant says, from a distance it’s pretty compelling.
21:22 — The anchors stay
Audience: are you going to continue out and finish over the tremolo anchors — plug them and re-do it?
Ian: No. The owner wants the anchors pulled, and I’m not doing it — too high risk, low reward. If he has them pulled and brings it back for the touch-up, I’ll do that. Same reasoning later on the knobs and pots: this guitar’s been in my shop over a year, and I have zero interest in spelunking to find out whether those are PAFs. The electronics have obviously been monkeyed with already — somebody did that for a reason — and it’s all risk, no upside, and no longer interesting as an intellectual exercise. I’m about done with this project.
22:50 — Live at the bench
Ian: [camera to the bench] This is the actual motion: wet the area with naphtha or retarder, come over it with little squirts, work it around, look. The airbrush is running soft — the regulator claims 25 PSI but I can’t hardly believe it; with this brush choking it down at the nozzle it behaves like sub-10. Tiny, very dilute black; tiny, very dilute yellow; over and over until it looks halfway decent.
Audience: what if one spot goes a little too yellow?
Ian: The good news: a little too yellow takes a little too black, and a little too black takes a little too yellow — up to a point. Once you pass the value of the surrounding territory, you’re hosed. A couple of early attempts went so black that no amount of yellow was bringing them back, and those came down.
26:00 — Fixing too-black
Ian: Sandpaper as a color fix is a desperate move — abrading changes the perceived color through diffuse reflection, and unlike the airbrush there’s no tapered edge: you take off what you take off, in very detectable lines. And never solvents — wiping a failed attempt with thinner just pushes material around into weird edges. What I actually do: wait a day, then take the failed layer off mechanically, like an archaeologist at a dinosaur bone — 600 grit is gentle enough, 2000 if I’m protecting original territory. We’re talking about a color layer maybe a thousandth thick: dye ridden into a clear coat via retarder. If it went too black, the next pass just carries less dye — black to where I want it, seal coat of lacquer, then the same game with the yellow.
30:36 — Sink-back and the one-year timer
Scott (asking): It already looked perfect — what’s the goal now?
Ian: It was looking really good — so I put the case in the window for a couple of weeks to force the sink-back, and it sank, and there wasn’t enough lacquer to stay level. So: a bit more lacquer, and now we level and buff again. I was pushing cure the first time and half-expected the kickback. It’ll probably move again a year from now too — this guy’s on a timer to bring it back, and who knows, it may want one more whisper of clear someday. For the leveling: foam blocks, because the top here is all compound curvature — including my square plug tapered into a round surface — and a hard block would facet it. Double-stick tape, conforming foam, easy does it — and if I ever see black on the paper towel, I stop instantly, because that’s a clear coat gone.
Ian: Polishing: my favorite compound — the discontinued 1500 Super Intensive — brings lacquer up without ever involving a buffer. But only short of the ultimate polish: the cut checks look better once rubbing compound knocks their hard edges off, and this guitar is supposed to stay dirty. I deliberately left the overspray sitting on the surrounding grime hoping it would come off with the dirt — which it mostly does, except now there’s a clean shiny patch on a dirty guitar, which is its own little tragedy on an instrument that’s meant to look untouched.
42:22 — Cutting checks
Ian: Cutting checks into the new lacquer: never the point of the blade — I use the back edge, angled the way the surrounding checks read, starting in a real check and carrying it across the repaired area so old and new connect. And I deliberately hold the knife wrong — way back on the handle where wobble happens on its own — because consistency is the tell. Less is more. Cut checks never look as good as real ones: I built this with the Oxford lacquer in the schedule, and I tried a little of the GluBoost fold-checking early on and peeled it back off — it makes a particular kind of checking, and it wasn’t this guitar’s checking. After cutting, rubbing compound again to age the edges — and yes, white compound in checks looks wrong, but this guitar already had white-filled checks from somebody’s old polish job. The rescue for that, when you need it: Lockwood oil-based dyes in naphtha — or water-based dyes — saturated into the checks; the white takes up the dye and goes dark again.
48:28 — Magic dirt and the wrap
Ian: Sheen is not an all-or-nothing proposal. The finishing move is the same philosophy as the color: the Mohawk Perfect Blend dead-flat — as much flattening agent as you can get in a rattle can — decanted down to nearly nothing, drowned in retarder: just enough lacquer to bind, retarder to make it stick, silica to bust the sheen. Misted on, it flows out like the Mohawk blender flow-out trick — like you breathed on it. Before that, black dye in naphtha goes into the checks the compound whitened, since the mist would seal that white in. Then a low-quality white paper towel, rubbed hard, to burnish — and leave it. If this came into my shop I’d find it on inspection, sure. But for the most part: done. (Price check from the audience: $1,500 — and it went quick, apart from the second swing. Less is more. Unless it’s money.)
Ian: Any questions before we wrap up? …Yes, that was Eruption in B-flat minor. Thanks, guys — have a good day.