Dub's Wacky Project Guitars Thread--we're baaaaaack

[dubkitty]

i got a hair up my butt and decided to try some finishing stuff on the GFS Galaxiemaster body, whose paint has a nice case of orange peel. the heavier (Meguiar’s) polishing compound was ineffective so i went to sanding with 2000 which seems to work. i’ll have to polish out the test area to be sure, but a single round of sanding would be much better than i’ve been expecting.

[dubkitty]

i'm slowly working my way into the Jetstar stuff. i was kind of disappointed in how well the CA worked on the headstock ding and that's dampened my enthusiasm somewhat, as have the facts that i'm very tired, somewhat depressed, and generally burned out on sanding and tweaking things. but it's happening.

i decided the best thing to do first was to fill the divot left after i dug the white paint and filler out of damage to the fretboard on the bass side at the 2d fret, assumedly the main point of force in the break. that seems to be going swimmingly for the moment...the filler looks much more in tune with the paler-rosewood board than it did with the mahogany on the Kondor body though of course it isn't dry yet. i also spread a little filler over adjoining areas of the board edge which had white paint impregnated into glued cracks that i couldn't get out without doing violence to the edge. it's deliberately thicker than it strictly needed to be so i have a bit more wiggle room when reducing it. once that's dried and been sanded i'll clearcoat the divot and the exposed edge of the board in the adjoining areas, which is about 2 inches. there's another spot where the finish on the edge of the board is funky down by the neck join, but i haven't decided whether to redo that as well. when the clearcoat had dried and been sanded down i'll tape it off and start with the CA. i still plan to try the CA out on the body ding first where a lousy result would be less consequential. perhaps later, after more coffee.

[dubkitty]

today's results were mixed. i think the side of the fretboard came out reasonably well, and some lacquer marker balanced it out a bit. i did a drop fill of clear CA for the divot after the photo was taken. the irregular edge between the fingerboard and neck will be taken care of when i do the painting.

on the other hand, the side ding wasn't nearly as successful. i was able to mix a pretty close match to the paint color and get it applied consistently to the problem area. however, once again the (tinted) white CA was unable to cover the darker imperfections. it was also a screaming bitch to sand, and in the process some additional spots got the paint sanded off. you're supposed to be going in the opposite direction, dammit.

at this point i'm declaring CA, at least in the StewMac formulation, ineffective for finish fixes other than small drop fills. i'm quite disappointed given that they represent otherwise. i guess the next thing will be to find some Vintage White paint that won't fuck up the extant poly finish and go for a Kondor-style coverup of the bad bits. i'll still find some way to make it look OK, but i really didn't need the letdown on a Monday. oh well. i won't get back to this till Wednesday because i'm going out to Becky's straight after work and thus won't have time to shop.

[dubkitty]

i found some satin finish Vintage White craft paint at Michael's which isn't quite an exact match, but it's pretty damn close. it wasn't doing a terrific job of covering the dark spots so i rather troweled it on. i'd rather sand more than sand through. the headstock seems to be coming along quite well, and i'm managing to get a decent straight edge between the black face and the white side.

the side looks to be a bit more challenging because of the dark areas of exposed mahogany. i'll do another coat here and then carefully sand down till i get a reasonably flat surface.

assuming i can get a decent flat painted surface, the rest should be relatively simple. a couple of coats of clear brush-on poly, some judicious sanding and polishing, and we should be rolling. they say to leave an hour between coats, but i'm not doing another till the afternoon (it's 0845 now). if i have one big takeaway in filling and sanding, it's that it almost always takes way longer for something to dry and harden than it says on the can. but i feel better now...i may not be able to match the OG paint perfectly, but at least the flaws won't be visible from 3 feet away. it's also possible that the clearcoat might balance out the colors as happened with the sides of the Kondor body.

i feel really good about the actual surface of the neck, which sanded down nicely to get rid of the broken paint that was clinging on. i'm waiting to do the neck stuff until i see how well the paint does on the areas i don't have to touch every time i play. if the acrylic->clearcoat thing is a winner, all i need to worry about is cleaning up the edge of the fingerboard. then i need to file deeper slots in the bridge saddles because the Stetsbar's two moving steel plates leave the bridge a bit higher than optimal for decent action. i'll have to be careful, though, because the bridge is a bespoke Stetsbar part with conical projections where the bridge posts would go through the bridge. i think it'll be OK because i'm a lot more careful now after doing a few nuts and bridges.

[dubkitty]

noticed that the back of the M-75 was rather more scratched and dingy/dull than i’d originally thought, so i broke out the Meguiar’s and in half an hour it was much improved. with that done there’s really nothing else to be done with it other than putting on the pickguard when it (finally) arrives. my fucking shoes from China will arrive sooner.

IMG_6899.jpeg (104.25 KiB) Viewed 74 times

[dubkitty]

second coat on the side ding and headstock edge done. now i have to do something i'm not good at doing, which is be patient and let it cure before going at it. i so want this to be done, because it's been an inordinate pain in the ass and because it's going to be so fucking great when it's done. but i'm not there yet.

[dubkitty]

sanded down the first pass this morning. once again the headstock is doing better than the body, since it’s a smaller area with simpler problems. it sanded down pretty well, using 1500 and 2000 only to keep from tearing up the uncured white paint.

since everything else is bearable—i may do something to color the acrylic depending—i put a small second coat on the visible dark area and am hoping for the best.

the side damage is much trickier to deal with because of multiple planes and multiple hues to conceal. it didn’t come out wonderfully, but i think there’s still potential for a decent fix.

similar to the headstock tactics, i applied a thin coat of white on the problematic dark spots and will go back tomorrow and carefully sand as little as possible to get a flat surface. if it looks good tomorrow, great. i might try putting some poly clearcoat on before sanding to give a bit more leeway. otherwise it’s back to the drawing erm, painting board. i swear that if i have to spray Vintage White auto paint into a can and paint it with that, i will.

looking at the photos i actually feel a bit better because they remind me of being able to fix the color problems o. the Kondor body. someday it’ll be done.

[dubkitty]

it just struck me that i have clear and amber lacquer markers, which if carefully jiggered could be the answer to matching the new paint to the old paint.

[dubkitty]

it turns out that the craft acrylic paint also won't work. first of all, it needs to be baked in a 350° oven for an hour, which obviously isn't on. the next fun thing is that since it's not cured it's not properly dried. so you can't use poly clearcoat on it because it's water-based and the shit just wipes off. this is starting to get frustrating. i need to do some research on alternative paints, and will probably have to spend an afternoon plonking around visiting art shops, crafts stores, and auto parts stores for something i can match to the original finish that will work and is opaque enough to cover contrasting colors.

on the bright side it plays great, and the case for the M-75 arrives today so that's completely done. or as done as it's going to be until i find another flaw LOL.

i have to say that i hate finishing problems even worse than i hate soldering. it's so time-consuming just to get an unusable result, and the amount of sanding required is genuinely painful for my hands and arms. after sanding the CA glue spots my arms were so sore i couldn't hold my weight when i got in the bathtub that night. i'm going to try to avoid this sort of project with paint problems in the future. i kind of didn't have a choice with the Jetstar other than to throw it away, and that would have been a waste of a good neck and good pickups. and i got the Kondor body way before i started caring about the appearance of the end result. i hope i find an answer soon other than giving up, because this is really getting frustrating. i am DEFINITELY never refinishing a whole guitar. i'd rather go to a Dead & Co. concert; i abominate them, but it would be over sooner. if i have much more trouble with this it's going to be tempting to pull the pickups for use elsewhere, sell the Stetsbar, and chuck the fucking thing. which would be unfortunate because it's a pretty neat guitar. but i only have so many hours remaining in my life...how many of them do i want to spend monkeying around with what i might call an Accidental Guitar? there's a M-75T husk on eBay for horrendously cheap, and a DeArmsby for it from a different seller. those LB-1s would drop right in. which ironically was the plan for the sparkly blue M-75T before i decided the pickups were OK. and that brings us back to do, re, mi, fa....

[dubkitty]

so i did a whole bunch of Googling and reading, and it turns out that the inherited wisdom that it'll fuck up poly if you paint over it with lacquer is largely false. i wish i'd known this 2 months ago, as it would have saved me a ton of frustration and handwork. turns out you can get nitrocellulose Vintage White in a tin rather than a spray can. i'd have ordered some, but i can't find my wallet. this will mean at least an additional week or so of delay, but i'm OK with that because i can finally see actual light at the end of the tunnel. i should take a projects break, but there are a couple of small things that need done. i want to rewire the Kondor controls so the signal goes straight from the pickup selector switch to the varitone in a last-ditch attempt to get a better result. it may be fruitless in that i've seen it claimed that varitones in general don't work well with low-output pickups, but it did seem to help when i took out the tone control and it only requires moving a couple of wires so what the fuck. i also need to take a look at the Duo Sonic...the last time i plugged it in i was getting hardly any output. hopefully it's something dumb like a dirty switch or jack. i'll probably at least look at that. i can use the Kondor just fine as-is so it's much less urgent.