Nikolas lacquer dyes

[bloke]

If I could UN-learn how to ten-finger type, maybe (??) my posts would be more reasonable in length (c. 1/4th or less)...??

I'm probably going to sell my really nice-playing thick-wall King sousaphone - which features a considerably worn satin silver finish, as it's the original 93-year-old finish. Nikolas offers some pretty interesting dyes which are designed to mix in very well with their venerable # 2105 nitrocellulose clear lacquer (designed for spraying onto brass etc.) I mentioned that they had a opaque metallic silver dye which really looks very close to real satin silver plating, and - when I wondered if I should touch up the worn areas with that stuff - I was shouted down (even though people are perfectly happy with instruments sprayed with the same lacquer with no dye added).
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So much for that, and that's NOT the topic of this post, but the topic is that Nikolas has an incredible selection of lacquer dyes - most of which are translucent, and it's taking me a long time to learn, but I'm learning how to dye new lacquer to come close to matching old darkened lacquer. Rick Denney will probably (??) tell you that I didn't a fairly good job, recently. The only problem is that it doesn't have any scratches or scuffs in it... (I have inherited none of her talent and have none of her knowledge, but my mother was a commercial artist and could take paints and mix them together to perfectly match existing colors, and she seemed to do it effortlessly. Back then, there were no computer matching programs. She actually used those talents to repair places in the walls of our house that got scuffed or damaged, which saved having to repaint an entire wall or ceiling... amazing. If you own a classic guitar and it's reasonably high quality and fairly ornate, you're familiar with those tiny little squares of wood ("marquetry"....??) which decorate their head stocks and sound holes. A former employee/idiot broke the headstock off my guitar in my shop, after picking it up and screwing around with it without my permission. Of course I fired him on the spot, but after I repaired the headstock, my mother went back and painted in those tiny little squares so as it looked as if nothing had ever happened. She even painted the wood grain back in on the side and back...absolutely no evidence of a repair. If any of you know who Grant Wood was, she studied with him at the University of Iowa back in the 1930s. For several decades, a painting of hers hung in the entryway of the administration building.)
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A gentleman recently did me a nice favor and resurfaced all of my sixty years or older tapered steel rods and got all the nicks out of them. (He has access to a larger metal lathe than mine.) He personally does really minor repairs on trumpets for people, as he is a trumpet player. He had three saxophones that needed repair. One was for a student at his church, and the other two were for him to resell - and he really had too much money in them, but whatever. I'm not the woodwind wizard that Mrs bloke is, but I can make saxophones play. She wasn't here, I got all three playing pretty well, and one of them was a translucent hot red (whatever that color is) soprano saxophone with a curved bell and a curved neck. The bell itself was really messed up and there were other structural issues which I repaired. By the time I got the bell looking good, there was some inevitable distress on that translucent sort of metallic-ish (but not metallic... translucent) red lacquer. I chuckled when I looked through my selection of Nikolas lacquer dyes, and found that I had that absolutely exact match of red, and was able to touch up the places where the lacquer chipped when I straighten that bell out, and it ended up looking quite nice. I wonder what made me choose that color to buy? Admittedly, I am trying to collect up a fairly diverse selection of those dyes, but I certainly don't plan on having some of every single color they offer. Again, I tend to mix them in tiny amounts to very subtly tint clear lacquer to make it look old. It's really handy for ONLY re-lacquering the outer bows of something like a baritone/euphonium/French horn/tuba, when the interior (time-consuming) parts actually feature pretty decent original lacquer, and it would be a shame to strip all of that just to make the exterior re-lacquered parts match, after straightening out all of the damage.