Joined:
September 2016
Posts: 7
| I just acquired a grey/green burst UKII and there's very little damage to the outer shell, and wish to keep it that way.
I generally am very good to my guitars, but is this thing like an eggshell? I have seen some with entire pieces missing from the the coating- and admittedly I do seem to notice a very very minuscule "give" to the guitar's surface if you squeeze it. Is the guitar notoriously fragile, and do i need to use any special product for it's cleaning?
This guitar is crazy- Aristides 40 years early.
Thanks,
Mark |
Joined:
December 2001
Posts: 7222
Location: The Great Pacific Northwest | Hi and Welcome,
Actually they are pretty sturdy guitars. It's an injected foam over an aluminum core and it was "spun up" so the outer part of the foam became a hard shell as you refer. The aluminum core is pretty substantial, and I've never felt any "give" of the body at all so I wonder if the core somehow deteriorated? I've never seen that. The ONLY thing you need to be careful of, just like a lot of "foam" is of you break the outer shell, the foam is just crumble so it should be sealed ASAP. But, as I'm trying to infer, it's pretty hard to penetrate that shell. In fact I have some photos where I cut an old body in half to show how it's made. In the process I wanted to remove the foam from one half to get a good look at the core. Hitting the finished shell with a hammer was a BAD idea as the hammer just bounced off without damaging the shell other than a mar on the finish. |
Care and feeding of UKII "shell"
