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Hi all,
I wanted to provide and alternative method for removing a pickguard that seems much less invasive/risky than what I have previously seen on this forum (and others). The go-to method appears to be using a source of heat (e.g., hair dryer, heat gun) to partially melt the pick guard's glue, then to slowly pry the guard up once the glue has softened. Then, some sort of solvent (e.g., naptha/lighter fluid, "goo gone") is used to remove the remaining residue from the guitar top after the pick guard has been removed. I know many have used the above method tons of time successfully, but I was a little nervous to try this on my brand new guitar - so I went looking for alternatives. I used the below technique on my new E1SS-DLX-SB this morning to remove the pick guard, and it worked perfectly. While I know this guitar is a J45 clone, I really don't like how the pickguard looks on it. Additionally, the burst is really beautiful IMO, so I wanted to remove the guard if possible to show more of that burst. Since my goal was to have a guitar without any pickguard at all, the cleanup had to be immaculate.
To remove the guard, I used a once folded piece of printer paper and slid it under the pick guard starting at the pointy part closest to the fretboard (I used a finger nail to get things started). Then, using a sawing motion with the paper, I slowly worked my way down the guard, which was remarkably easy. In my case, once the guard was halfway off, I was able to (very) slowly peel the guard off without any assitance from the paper, and no damage to the finish/top occured.
There was still some glue residue left behind, and sawing the paper along under the pick guard resulted in some glue being smeared beyond the boundaries of the original guard itself. Consquently, some sort of cleanup was required. In my case, the glue was too hard to roll into little balls/peel off by hand, as is often recommended (likely because I hadn't used any heat to partially melt the glue). At this point in the removal I was a little nervous, since the guitar top looked pretty awful!
One poster on another forum indicated that butter can be effective at removing glue smears. Yep - butter like you use to cook with. This seemed to be pretty low stakes - if it didn't work, there presumably wouldn't be any damage to the guitar or finish, other than increasing its colesterol (ha..). I just took a little dab of room temperature butter on a paper towel, and went to town on the glue spots. Just enough butter to barely cover the glue areas in a sheen - a little goes a very long way! It took a little elbow grease, but it really did an amazing job of removing all the glue residue. I then cleaned things up with a little soapy water to remove the butter from the top once I was done, and it polished right up! If you told me the guitar came from the factory without a pick guard, I would believe you. There is no indication in the gloss finish that a pick guard was ever on the guitar. I think I have correctly attached a few photos, so hopefully you can see what I mean.
A few disclaimers: This was basically a brand new guitar. If you try this on an older guitar, the top will likely have aged, and the wood outside the pickguard will likely be a darker color than the unexposed wood currently under the pickguard (often referred to as guitar "tan lines"), and it will be obvious a guard was removed. Also, I have only done this once, and it was to an eastman guitar with TrueTone Gloss finish and a stock eastman pickguard. I have no idea how this method would work with other guitar brands/pickguards/finish types.
Hopefully this helps someone else further down the road!
PS: could just be the satisfaction from a job well done, but I think there may have been a small benefit to guitar tone as well!
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