Then to finish stripping that awful tiger-stripe finish: I used a little bit of paint stripper, and an awful lot of sandpaper + elbow grease. I wasn't sure how I was going to re-finish it, but I wanted to keep the history on the headstock. The grain of the body turned out to be pretty disinteresting, though the colour of the timber was really nice. I couldn't think of an effective way to keep the headstock as was while keeping the timber in it's natural state, so it was a pretty easy choice to stain the body black.
Sealed the body with a few coats of shellac. Again, note how terribly imprecise my maple shim is above the soundhole. If I were to do it again I'd be much more careful about making it as exact as I could. At least I made it as level as I could...
Also, at some early point in this process I had cut the binding channels and installed the binding, using one of these:
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