Artificially aging Pearloid bindings?

[JLT]

I don't know if this falls under repairs, but I couldn't think where else to put it.

I removed the back of a guitar recently, destroying the bindings, which were wood. The bindings on the top were Pearloid, that plastic stuff that looks kinda like pearl. These bindings were twenty years old, at least. I ordered new Pearloid bindings from LMI and installed them. They look fine, except that they're very, very white and the old ones on the top have yellowed with age.

Is there any way to stain the new bindings so they match the old ones? I don't know what kind of stain, if any, can be used on plastic. So far, my experiments with using wood stain on the binding scraps have been failures ... the stain simply won't penetrate into the plastic. But I figure that there are a lot of crafty old repair persons who have come across this situation and have come up with a solution.

[tippie53]

are you sure it wasn't the lacquer that yellowed? In this case you may just want to use a toner on top of the binding to give the appearance of age. The old plastic may color a bit but you can control the appearance with the toners. Also you can use the tricks from FRETS.COM put lacquer in a glass jar out in the sun. It will color naturally and you can use that. It takes a month but you can control the color nicely.

[B. Howard]

I tape the bindings off and use my airbrush and some colored lacquer with my airbrush to get the tone right. Move the tape back about 1/8" and apply a few coats of clear to seal in the new bindings then a quick bit of sanding and polishing. I work out the color on a scrap piece of binding.

[JLT]

are you sure it wasn't the lacquer that yellowed?

When I got the guitar, it was in an unfinished state, and there was no lacquer on it. (Yeah, a guitar that had been sitting around unfinished for over twenty years...)

I'll look up that sitting-in-the-sun trick on the FRETS site. Unfortunately, I don't have an airbrush, but I can certainly apply the colored finish with a brush.

[JLT]

Update:

I did check out the Frets site regarding sun-darkening lacquer but decided not to go that route because it looked like it would take a lot of time for the lacquer to age.

Instead, I just took a yellow felt marker and went over the binding. It "ambered" the binding enough to make it a fairly good match in normal light. It does look a bit too yellow in sunlight, but if I went out and got a brown felt marker and went over it again, it looks like it would provide the additional darkening to make a perfect match.