Friday, May 16, 2008

The finish (part two)

Before you spray your guitar, you should really apply some sort of sealant, otherwise the lacquer (or whatever) will get sucked into the wood like you wouldn't believe. This will make life much more difficult for you and can even affect the tone.
So after applying some stain, that's what I did. Just one layer of sealing varnish, followed by a bit of light sanding.

Next, it was a case of applying layer after layer of spray-on lacquer. This will probably take longer than you think. I lost count of the number of layers I added, and this was probably due to my not applying the sealing varnish correctly. The wood just kept sucking that lacquer in.

Every few layers, you should do some very light wet sanding to try to keep the surface as perfect as possible. If you manage to remove some of the stain by accident, just re-apply it. It's actually not as serious a problem as you might think (or at least it wasn't in my case).

Here's a picture of the guitar with several layers of lacquer applied (as well as some preparation work for the electrics installation, which I'll discuss later):


Even after many, many layers, you can see how the wood is sucking that lacquer. After this photo, I removed the metal parts and kept going with the lacquer until I managed to get a nice smooth finish.

Here are a couple of pictures of the body after the lacquering was completely finished:



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