Hi, pwoster, I'm from an old Charleston family, and like all the men of my lineage I went to the Citadel.
That aside, the problem with trying to polish a satin finish to a high gloss is that there usually isn't enough finish material on there to be able to buff it up properly. That guitar is old enough that Taylor would have used nitrocellulose lacquer on it, and it's just a fragile finish, no two ways about it.
The advantage of nitrocellulose, though, is that you can overspray what's on there with more layers of nitro, and then polish it down to the sheen that you want.
But quite honestly, that's a fairly involved process. The nitrocellulose layers have to cure between coats, and in a humid climate like Charleston's that can take quite a bit of time.
Taking the guitar to a professional to have it refinished will cost a LOT of money. It's quite labor-intensive work, and it's easy to screw it up, so you should only give it to a truly experienced repairman.
It will be significantly cheaper to have the one problem spot refinished to match the rest of the finish, though. That's both doable and affordable.
Now, this forum and every other online guitar forum has plenty of folks who have shined up their satin finish guitars and who think the results look great. Because there isn't enough finish material on the guitars to buff out to a high gloss, they can only get them about as shiny as the seat on a worn-out pair of corduroy pants. But they're deeply enthused, nonetheless.
Never mind that the vast majority of them will have buffed out guitars with some sort of polyester satin finish on them, not nitrocellulose, but you'll undoubtedly be encouraged to start buffing away on your 39 year old nitro finished Taylor anyway.
I'd suggest that you resist the temptation. Despite the accolades about the joys of home shine jobs you will read, ALL of the many such guitars that I have personally seen and handled have run from mediocre (at best) to downright wretched. It is extremely easy to blow all the way through the finish to the bare wood below, and it'll be all the easier for you to do so because you'll be dealing with nitrocellulose, not the tougher polyester finishes most of these other guys have buffed up.
Even so, most of them still go all the way through the finish in little spots here and there. Of all of the dozens of these home-shined guitars that I've seen, there were only two where the guys doing the work managed to avoid blowing through the finish.
Two.
Now, if you have your heart set on doing that, there's nothing I can do to dissuade you, especially since you'll probably get at least a dozen posts cheering you on in addition to this one post where I'm telling you something you don't want to hear.
I understand that. But what I would strongly suggest you do before you commit to trying to shine up a guitar that really shouldn't be shined up is that you take the guitar to an experienced professional repair tech with hands-on experience spraying lacquer finishes. A spot repair will be a lot less expensive than a complete refinish, and the guitar will look better than any attempt at buffing it out is likely to make it.
Hope this helps.
Wade Hampton Miller
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