I have finally finished the guitar! Everything is done and it sounds amazing! I’m going to quickly wrap up the paint process and then soon, I will add a pickup blog and a reassembling and setup blog.
Body:
· Last time I wrote, I had finished priming the guitar. As I mentioned in my “steps to come” part of that article, I proceeded with my layer of red. I applied two or three coats of red to the section I needed. There was no point in painting the whole guitar red when a portion of it would remain white.
· After letting it dry for an entire day, I masked off my red stripes and then painted white. I was notified by a friend who paints guitars that white is extremely hard to work with and that I should use a lot. I later found out what he was talking about. I applied an entire can of white paint to the guitar and I am lucky I did. For some reason, the clear coat seemed to bring out the base colours so if there wasn’t enough white, this could have turned ugly.
· So, I now had a fully painted guitar. I let it sit for two or three days before I began clear coating. I put on about 5 layers of clear coat one day and then 5 more another day. There was a lot of clear coat. You want to make sure you apply it thinly and evenly. I seemed to have a problem with that because I was outside and it was really windy that week. I ended up getting a pretty even finish; however it resulted in a few runs; but nothing that was too big or bad.
· Once clear coating was done, I let it sit for a few more days. Then I did a very light wed-sanding job to make sure everything was evened out. It helped remove some of the bumps and even took out a bit of the run. It also removed some of the bug parts that happened to get clear coated into the paint job. After sanding, I used Turtle Wax Scratch and Swirl Remover to polish the guitar. Wow; did it ever get shiny!
And that’s that for painting the guitar. It’s really important to let it sit a few days between the painting, clear coating, and finishing of the guitar. Make sure the paint dries before you do anything to drastic. Now, mine didn’t turn out perfect, but for a first time at it, I’d say I’ve done well for myself.
Headstock:
· When I left off last time, I had painted red and black on the headstock. After a day of drying, I sprayed on the white paint and let it dry for a couple of days, just like the body.
· After drying, I got my brother to draw on a design for my headstock logo. I wanted something original and something that would mean something to me. After throwing out ideas, we stumbled upon pi. I have this weird thing about myself where I can recite 60 decimal places of pi and I used to be able to do it in less than 10 seconds. Just using a sharpie pen (0.1 fine), he wrote out 80 digits (which means I need to memorize 20 more decimal places) and drew on the Greek letter for pi. It turned out really well; I’m not sure how he writes so small yet so legibly.
· I let that sit overnight before throwing on the clear coat the next day. Again, 5 coats one day and 5 another. Pretty soon it was shiny and done.
· After drying for a couple days, I wet-sanded and polished it along with the body. It turned out so beautifully.
And now, my guitar is done and ready to be reassembled. After polishing, I did put the guitar back together. I put the tuners in (after drilling new holes for the screws – see pictures), put the pickguard on as well as the backplate, and attached the neck and bridge to the guitar. In the next articles, I will talk about installing the pickups and setting up the guitar (I intonated it myself!).
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