Hope everyone's had a great Christmas/festive season!

Man, I've been a complete slacker on these guitar builds. 2017 got hectic, and somehow these side projects got relegated to the bottom of the to-do list. Anyway, I figure I'm on holidays for a few weeks and I should start off 2018 as I mean to go on (which is to say, building a lot of guitars/guitar effect pedals)

So, I got the kit out from storage and had a reassess. Part of the reason I'd halted work was because I just wasn't happy with the logo, and couldn't come up with one I preferred. Still haven't quite resolved that particular issue, but while I was spending hours staring at the headstock I noticed the veneer was sanded through in the bottom right hand corner. I'm guessing this was from the factory, because I'm 99% sure I haven't touched the headstock veneer (I was too terrified). In any case, I decided to do a little more shaping to remove the affected area, and while I was at it I got a bottle of Goof-off and removed a large glue patch which you can't see in the photo, but which was quite large and covered most of the centre of the veneer.



Also spent ages trying to get a red stain I was happy with, and in the end decided to go straight black for the body and neck. The hope is it will make the spalted front really pop. Also I couldn't decide on hardware options that would suit the kind of red I was imagining, but now I'm rolling with the idea of black hardware on the front against the spalted top, and gold hardware on the back against the black. Will post some pics of the stain-in-progress in the next few days.

The staining process has been fun. I stained the body with Colortone black after sanding to 320, and then I've been sanding the body in the same way as I did the front - a couple of thick layers of tru-oil over a few days, then wet sanded with tru-oil and increasingly fine grades of sandpaper. It's coming along well - currently on 600 grit. I added some Colortone black to the tru-oil just in case I accidentally sanded through anywhere, and it seems to be working really well.