A solid day on the sandpaper today to get the primer laid out. More great lessons learned:
a) There's actually a fair amount of time that you need to invest in making some basic tooling on your first build... Today's tool was the painting handle for the body. This is iteration 1 - I'll likely redo it with some 1 inch dowel or something that I can put in a jig down the line, but getting dimensions right to give me a bit of edge-over in the neck pocket for spraying and looking at a minimum impact, full back exposure design... photo's below. Basically a handle onto a block (roughly the size of the neck plate, and some studs that slide into the screw holes, then you can just punch a single screw into the middle of it all)
b) When you're proud as punch of the sanding you've done and you've got a silky glass-like finish with 220 grit sandpaper, you're probably only half way there
c) the first hit of primer will very quickly expose all the sins of the world!
For info, I did a full large can of the Septone primer filler from Supercheap Auto - 1 medium coat sanded back (220), then 3 fine coats ready to just lightly knock back (360 grit) and lay down the undercoat colour.
I thought I'd done a stellar job with the sanding, but the primer quickly disproved that theory. I'd always planned to prime and sand and re-prime, but I was surprised at how much grain stood up and invisible marks jumped out once that primer hit.
Anyways, here's some images:
These are just the rough handle... a bit of tite bond and 2 screws to hold it all together
Post primer and sand down, still shows some good low spots in the original sanding. Lighting detail on the headstock is masked off now - the face of the headstock will be the same as the guitar, with a natural lightning bolt per the customer's request (that would be my childrren)
That blue on the handle was a bit of a test spray to see how all the layers come together - that's roughly the final colour. It's a Lamborghini colour called Blu Cepheus which has a metric butt-load of blue pearl over a blue undercoat.
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