I bought a great guitar yesterday - a Gibson Joan Jett Melody maker.
See how cool it is…
For reasons that nobody could possibly understand, a previous owner painted over the Joan Jett signature on the truss rod cover. It’s beyond me why anyone would do that, especially since you can’t buy replacements but you can buy plain black ones for about $6.
It’s gonna be pretty much impossible to remove the paint without damaging the printed on signature or the plastic cover itself.
The good news is I found a place that will custom make an engraved truss rod cover for me.
But…
I need a decent image of the signature for them to reproduce and the only pics I can find on the Internet are just not good enough.
So…I’m hoping somebody can help out by making an image file (nothing special, can even be jpg) of the signature. it doesn’t even have to be a perfect reproduction, just something close enough to the original.
I’m happy to pay for it too, so if anyone knows of a commercial service that will do this for me please tell me.
First port of call to me would be using some nail polish remover to gently strip back the layer of paint the guy put over the signature. If you do this with cotton buds/cotton pad very gently (and not using too much acetone) you might be able to remove a single layer.
I can probably get a decent jpeg of it from that image and correct the distortion of it - I’ll give it a shot at work tomorrow.
Yes and no. Despite the truss rod cover being terribly uglified, I think solvents will almost certainly damage the plastic. And I’d rather keep a badly painted original than destroy it completely.
But in the end it’s just a piece of plastic - I can live with it fine but since there’s an opportunity to get a custom made one I think that’s worth a shot. Even though it means spending a chunk of money for a small aesthetic improvement.
Perfect Ezy! Now just do a quick CSI Enhance on it and job done
This is a bit easier said than done.
It’s hard to choose the right forum and there are dozens of them, it’s an uncommon guitar because it was only produced for a couple of years, I’d have to join up somewhere and immediately ask for help that hardly anyone can provide (and we know how that kind of thing goes down here), and I’m a really lazy person.
The worst case for me is that I’ll print the best one I can find and try to trace it. But my graphic skills are crap so that’s why it’s the last resort.
