Description

Lake Placid Blue was a metallic finish from Fender, which officially became available as a custom colour on the company's guitars in 1960. The finish was originally achieved with an existing metallic blue (inspired by the Cadillac Brougham car paint) sealed with an acrylic lacquer top coat.

Lake Placid Blue is a fairly subtle shade which could be described as a darkish blue. However, the metallic nature of the paint means that changes in the lighting angle will brighten the appearance of the shade – potentially very significantly. LPB was meant to represent a blue lake, and that’s exactly the type of colour it was.

Alongside Candy Apple Red, Lake Placid Blue remains one of the most famous and best known Fender custom colours. These two finishes kept the original concept of stunningly attractive metallic colours alive for the longest period beyond the '60s in the CBS era.

Colours for vintage-inspired guitars
After great work and exhaustive study by our laboratory and technical department, we have created colours for guitars to faithfully recreate the tones of vintage Fender and Gibson guitars to paint electric guitars. They have been based on original samples from the ‘50s and ‘60s. However, keep in mind that vintage guitar colours may have changed a lot over the years due to the aging of nitrocellulose lacquer and changes in the brands’ own colours. Therefore two guitars finished in 1960 with Fender card colours can look different between them or with respect to a more current guitar today.

Nitrocellulose paint in 500ml can
If you’d like to paint your guitar a perfect finish and you have painting equipment (spray gun and compressor) available, the best choice is nitrocellulose varnish in a can. You’ll get a higher performance by a lower price and with painting equipment the final result will be professional with less effort. It is recommended to dilute the product with our solvent to adjust the viscosity. For the application to be perfect we have two types of solvents: the usual solvent used is Solvent Medium (art. nr. 48138 / N540423104), but for ambient conditions of humidity and temperature more extreme we can use Solvent Retard (art. nr. 48139 / N540425104) to avoid bubbling and blooming in the finish.

The optimal application conditions are between a temperature of 15 to 25 °C and 50 to 70% humidity. The percentage of dilution will depend on the painting equipment and its configuration but it’s recommended to use 10 to 20% solvent. The most common gun peak is 1.3 to 1.5 and the compressor pressure is about 2.5 to 3 bars.