Build Update #17

I have 3 weeks off for break to refinish this guitar. Here's what I've done so far:





The guitar before refinishing. I had a couple of problems with this:
-The lacquer finish was very thin so it chipped and blemished easily. by blemish, i mean that with the slightest tap with any metal object leaves a white mark under the lacquer.
-The electronics short i mentioned earlier.
-The 'Bauer' logo started raising out of its cutout. This was due, most likely, to the dye i put in the epoxy, which forced it to never cure rock hard by the time I put the lacquer on.
-The exposed grain showing through the lacquer.
-When inserting the electronics, the lacquer got chipped in a number of places.


I had to resand the entire headstock due the to raised logo. I stopped here because i thought, if this was done properly, a pattern like this wouldn't look too bad.


All the lacquer was sanded off of the headstock along with the outer layer of dyed maple. The MOP logo was sanded flush. I will redye the maple before reshooting lacquer.


I started sanding down the body's lacquer. I focused on spots where the grain was highly visible. There was a lot of white blemishes around the output jack where the 1/4" jack bumped into the lacquer, so i sanded completely back to the wood.


The back got the same treatment. One thing i noticed while sanding down was some of the deeper pores were being filled with white powdered lacquer. I wiped most of it out with a naphtha damp cloth, but some still remains. I think leaving this in the grain will aid the refinish because once i spray a thinned coat of lacquer, the lacquer will melt the powder clear and fill the grain.


Here is the electronics taken back out and put into the pattern. Obviously i needed to redesign this to prevent shorts.


This design will allow the whole system to be slipped in in a straight line, one pot at a time. I snatched some new in-line capacitors with a lower tolerance to replace the cheap ones used before. I tested the circuit on both pickups. I also practiced slipping the electronics through the f-hole.


As for refinishing, I got a harbor freight spray gun and a quart of behlen's stringed instrument lacquer. My hopes are that, with this setup, i can lay down a thick layer of lacquer per coat. After the first couple of coats, i will sand the lacquer down until all of the grain is gone. After this, i can shoot the remaining coats and proceed with wet sand, buff, and shine.


In other news, i got a wood moisture meter and checked the didgeridoo branch i set aside from the first post on this blog. It is between 14-18% MC. By next summer, it should be within the seasoned range (roughly 10-12%), and i can split, hollow, and shape.

Had a great semester at PSU, and i'm looking forward to this break. Hopefully i get everything finished that i want by the end of my break. Expect an update sometime after christmas.

Happy Holidays
-Andrew