AMSnell

When you've seen this in the past, is it something that always requires repair, or something that you just leave? How does it normally play out?

I guess it could have been dropped, but I'd imagine that would have cracked the finish on the binding. There is also this same pattern on the other side of the back too. It's very odd - I've not seen something like it before. It's clearly not normal checking. I've not been able to find a comparable example anywhere on the internet either.

Hi all, I bought a used Gibson Custom ES-355 (Shinichi Ubukata) last weekend. Guitar was filthy when I bought it, so had to strip it basically completely back and give it a good clean. All good - almost immaculate but one thing caught my eye. Around the binding on the rear of the guitar is about 10-20cm of what appear to be scrape marks in the finish which can be felt, but appear to be under the clear coat. I came to the conclusion that these are scrape marks as it isn't a uniform pattern, like you see on checking, and the binding doesn't seem to be coming away at all. Even if it was - I doubt you'd see this pattern. So my conclusion is that this was done by the end of the binding scraper tool, which perhaps wasn't sharpened properly as it was dragged around. I wanted to run this past the experts first though. Do you think this is just a bad binding scrape job, or do you think this may be something different? Do you think this will remain as-is, or do you think it will get worse around that back edge? Is it repairable, should I choose to do that? Cheers all - really is appreciated. Photos taken with a macro camera so you can see the pattern!