Pickguard Off Gassing... Full refurb on this 1970s Ibanez Howard Roberts

Off gassing is an interesting thing that can happen to old Celluloid plastic, which was commonly used for pickguards/binding/heel caps etc... The celluloid starts to breakdown and then emits a corrosive gas. This gas attacks metal, as can be seen in the photo to the side. You can see the plastic breaking down and the metal around it corroding. Significant corrosion on the pickup. frets, pickguard mount and bridge piece. It attacks the strings too. There was also some signs of corrosion on the tailpiece and machine heads as well. The internal wires even had some significant corrosion, and the pots had some signs too, as did the volume/tone knobs.

What can make it worse is keeping the guitar closed in the case, which is what happened here. That way the gas has no means of escape and can just collect and attack all the metal components.

This 1970s Ibanez Howard Roberts needed a full overhaul. First step is to strip all of the affected components off the guitar. The pickguard, pickguard mount, pickup and bridge piece were all unfortunately too far gone to be salvage. All placed in a zip lock secure bag and disposed off carefully.

The tailpiece, machine heads and internal pots were all okay and could be cleaned. I just used some vinegar and then cleaned off with high

alcohol. Polished them up and they were good to go. I sourced a correct era Japanese pickup and bridge piece, got a pickguard made to the same style, size and shape as the original (I drew around it before disposing). Unfortunately the gent who made it wasn't able to do the bindings as can be seen on the original. I also managed to save all the original frets, and after a good bit of elbow grease and polishing they cleaned up nicely, still showed a little bit of discolouration but not enough to warrant replacing. Gave the whole guitar a good clean, installed all the new components, made sure all the electrical components were working, new strings, set up and she was good to go! This one was a real pleasure and privilege to get up and running again. Here are the results: