Quote Originally Posted by Simon Barden View Post
Clear either needs to go on as flat a surface as possible, or you need to use countless coats to build up enough depth to sand it back flat. It will just follow the contours underneath it, it won’t just fill up any dips first but also cover the bumps. You’d need a very thinned paint indeed for it to pool in the pits and even then, as mist of that liquid would be thinners, it would still dry out leaving a smaller pit, and the paint layer would be even thinner. A standard spray can is probably 30% paint/lacquer, the rest is propellent and thinners. Increase the amount of thinners and the paint content goes down considerably, so you’d need maybe 3x the number of cans.

Plus, too much thinning affects the paint finish and of course on anything but a horizontal surface, it’s just going to run off and not stick. So, getting the surface as flat as possible first is the ideal solution.

For the bass idea, as it would also have to be in parts (unless you get a new 3D printer), maybe you could make a full solid body bass in a jigsaw-style, so the pieces slot together nicely, provide mechanical strength for the joints and provide lots of glue area? You could also highlight the jigsaw effect if you wanted by having the pieces slightly different heights.
Thanks for that. I'll let it dry properly and give it a fairly aggressive sand to flatten it back out - most of the pock marks are from me touching it too soon, so I'll flatten it out, respray and get a couple of coats back over it and see if they come out tidier then try a gentle sand at 1200 and see how I'm looking.

Re: the bass idea. The design I'm looking at is a solid body, though it's only about 60% infill, but it'll still have a fair amount of mass too it. It also uses a couple of 10mm steel bars in the middle to re-enforce it as he's found the tension of the bass strings is a bit much. I suspect upping the infill to 100% would probably compensate it, but I reckon that'd be one heavy bass.. not to mention the hundred bucks in filament and couple of weeks of printing.
The relative solid body is definitely appealing - lots of good contact area for holding the whole thing together.
The jigsaw idea is interesting though I'd have to admit I suspect the comfort level playing it would suffer. Some interesting opportunities though to do something dodgy.... maybe embed a white circle that I can put a decal on top of.. with some LEDs under it or something. A little wanky but unique nevertheless.