I finished spraying the tobacco so that the edges were dark, as were there areas around the neck pocket ...
...but I wasn't quite happy with the evenness of the tobacco on the back. Some of the slight patches in the photo are just shadow, but it didn't look quite right.
Day 39. So I tried tidying the back up with a bit of light sanding to thin out some of the burst areas, which didn't work well and I just ended up with a solid edge between the colours in areas.
So I sprayed again to repair the back. I wasn't feeling great that day, my head was rather fuzzy and I knew I shouldn't have done anything - but it's autumn here and the nights are drawing in and the days are getting colder, so I wanted to press on whilst the weather was good.
The back got a touch more tobacco and looked OK, but I then decided to 'seal' the back and front with a quick clear coat - which was fine until I scratched the front all through the sunburst to the base coat in a long wiggly line whilst hanging the body up to dry (the solvent in the lacquer had softened the paint underneath).
I said a few rude words. (Actually I said rather a lot of very rude words).
When I was feeling better on day 42, I had a go at repairing the top, first with a paintbrush for the scratched areas and then with spray over the top. And then I stood back...
AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
OK, I've seen factory made guitars with worse finishes but it just wasn't right.
So after getting a bit on urging on from my mates, it was time to strip the top and start again.
It took the best part of two days to sand the top down. I probably should have stopped a bit sooner, but some of the lacquer was really well attached and wasn't being affected by hand sanding (and I didn't want to use too coarse a grade of paper to avoid putting deep scratches in the wood that would be hard to remove). So I got an electric detail sander which made life a lot easier, except that I then put some deep scratches in the wood that were hard to remove. As a result, I was pretty much at bare wood again all over, and had even taken the top layer of ply off in a couple of areas (which luckily would be darker areas when repainted).
Although the body is supposed to be basswood, I suspect that the outer ply is probably something like birch (but am happy to be corrected) to get the grain figuring. But the basswood underneath is pretty featureless and fine grained, so I stopped sanding before I'd got quite all the old lacquer off, just leaving a very fine layer in places, just in case I sanded through in places that would be visible later. So I got it back to this:
Which some people loved in a shabby chic sort of way. But it wasn't staying like that!
....
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