Next build - another tele!
Well that’s the thing. It’s hard to the touch. If you sand it, white powder comes off. It’s not like it’s smearing about when sanded.
A few days after the last coat, I did do light dry sand with 800 before leaving it. It was around a month before I started wet sanding.
When I say it’s soft, if I push my finger nail into it, it leaves an indent. (I’m doing these tests where the neck plate is going to be). I sanded it as I remember someone (Simon?) saying that it would increase the surface area and I thought that I might also remove the layers that are preventing the lower layers from hardening. But as I’m burning through in places it seems it’s not even that thick.
The same happened with my PB kit finish. It’s got a load of indents in it from “normal use”. I’m wondering if it’s either the poly / white spirit combo not working well together. Or I’m putting it on too thickly and not letting it dry enough before the next coat…. There’s too many variables to be able to viably experiment with.
Anyway - I’m going to leave it while I finish working on the inlay and then try to make a call on what to do next.
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Next build - another tele!
Well it's been a while and in that time I've given up on the inlay - After many hours and attempts I wasn't able to cut an accurate enough inlay in my test pieces to warrant attempting on the guitar. I think the main problem is that my design was too intricate for my skill level. I'm still going to keep practicing and hopefully an inlay will feature in a future build.
In the meantime I've applied an waterslide decal to the headstock and put around ten coats of TO on the neck. The headstock face is getting many more coats to try to bury the decal and get some kind of gloss.
After my last update I emailed Rustins, the manufacturer of the poly, to try and get some insight about what might be causing the softness in the finish. They suggested that I've put too much on for it to dry hard. But I'm not convinced that I'd be able to sand and polish to a gloss if it were to be any thinner. They also suggested that Rustin's Plastic Coating is a preferable product to their vanilla PU varnish for this type of application.
So I polished the body anyway despite it's softness. And of course managed to burn through again!... So now I'm trying to fix that.