Thanks everyone! Pretty excited about how it is coming along. Tomorrow while the newborn is sleeping I am going to wire the electronics. I am waiting on a custom waterslide for the headstock so I am in a bit of a holding pattern. Can't wait to spray clear on this and get it finalized though!
My next steps:
- put the wiring harness together (two Gibson burstbuckers (BB 1 and 2), some special left-handed CTS 500Ks, orange drop capacitor)
- drop the waterslide on when it arrives
- 10 coats of clear or whatever my rattle cans will accommodate
-cure for two weeks
- install the wiring harness, Gotoh Tune-o-matic bridge and stop piece, nice Grover inlines tuners, bell truss rod cover, strap buttons, black top hat knobs, etc.
My goal is to have this playable by May 10th. We will see if that goes according to plan haha. Thanks again to everybody who has chimed in or given advice!
Thanks! It's actually the same (all pale gold nitro from the same company) so it might be more of a lighting issue, but I did use two different rattle cans of it. I would love for it to look more two toned like the photo though haha.
I have two more coats of clear to go. Pretty excited! That said - my Stewart McDonald spray kit tells me that after ten coats, I should "dry sand" before applying the two final coats. My question, if anyone knows, is: what is that?
From a video I found, it seems that it is just taking 800 grit sanding paper and *gently* sanding the entire body (and neck in my case?) while constantly wiping your paper/guitar to clear dust until it looks smooth and matte.
Is that accurate? Does anyone here skip this step?
I believe my remaining steps would be "level sanding" with dry paper, wiping off, applying two more coats of clear, and then waiting for the 10-14 days to cure. Any insight would be appreciated!
I decided against what I was going to do above and wet-sanded the 10 coats of clear with 800 grit pretty briefly. Got it looking mostly matte but there are still some shiny spots. I am happy with the smoothness so I am going to hit it with the final two coats of clear before calling this done.
Two unfortunate things - I did not hide the imperfections on the bottom of the body enough. I thought about the water and heat trick, but will be happy with it as is. I am not going to sand it down again to try to hide it with grain filler or anything. I knew about these spots when I first looked at the kit, but thought they would hide a bit more than they did. Still overall very happy with how it looks!
The other unfortunate thing - I cannot spray the final coats today :-(
With that said - I ordered my custom truss rod cover. Can't wait to see it on the guitar. I screwed up my custom watermark so I added a plain branded one I had laying around. Kind of cheesy but I think it looks better than it otherwise would have blank.
I live in a place that rarely rains, so of course it has been raining and snowing nonstop in between spray days. I will follow up once this thing is curing!
Thanks! I am hopefully finishing the wiring today. I tested the electronics before fishing it and there's a buzz so I think I need to troubleshoot the soldering 😬
Your guitar came out absolutely amazing! I hope is sounds great, too!
Update: soooo close. There are some imperfections in the paint (a spot or two where I over-sanded. A spot or two that I used a q tip to touch up some exposed binding) but I am calling that an accidental relic job. Tomorrow I am going to do a setup. I am still waiting on a custom truss rod cover. With that said - I am super happy with it so far. It also has some strings that I need to de-buzz and I need to fine tune the pickup height, but I am incredibly happy with this for my first build:
I will follow up again once it's fully set up, fully polished, and the truss rod comes in!
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