Jul 14, 2018
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seen from Türkiye
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Completed the fret leveling and fret end filing. Final neck carving touch ups with cabinet scrapers (very useful indeed). Will leave the neck with just wax polish. Feels better without lacquer on the neck.
Test-fitting. Headstock carving done. Next: Final touch ups to the neck and headstock, installing the pickups. Hopefully it will find a suitable owner.
The acrylic matte finish looks much better than the gloss, at least with this colour scheme. I like the frosty look. Gloss only works if I am able to buff it to an ultra glass-quality nitro lacquer shine. Waiting for my order of 000 grit steel wool to arrive. Then it's a final polish with wax, and maybe restore a little more gloss to the painted part. One of the pic shows a test-fitting with the bridge and neck. Looks reasonable. Btw the photos don't show the many minor yet noticable imperfections that only an amateur can make. I'm not near any pro craftsman level. Will need to build a few more to refine my techniques. Ok, now to finish the neck for real.
First two coats of clear acrylic finish before sanding. Don’t really like the gloss look. Will see how a matte clear turns out, though not sure of it’ll make the pearl inlays pop less.
The initial plan was to just stain it white. Not that the grain was particularly outstanding but I didn’t wish to do aerosols spray this time. But (sigh of resignation) couldn’t remove the CA glue that seeped into the highly porous pine. Some was rather bad accidental runoffs that made the surface look unartistically splotchy.
So I thought: OK, could I paint a semi-abstract design over it and still keep an overall minimalist look?
I took grease paper, made a stencil, referenced one of my favourite designs (can you tell what it is?!), sprayed gesso from a can… then realised it needed a starker contrast. Raw pine didn’t stand out against flat white. That’s when I painted in a mix of carbon black + prussian blue acrylics.
A big part of home-building a guitar is the go-with-the-flow discovery aspect. Like all attempts at art pieces, the potential for screwups accompanies you every single step of the way.
Experimenting with a wet-on-wood wash effect. Painting on pine, which has been stained and sanded earlier. The flat white part is gesso from a spray-can. Will see how it goes. Still learning on the fly. Wasn't sure how the pine would take to diluted acrylics, and whether the gesso edges would hold. So far it's working out as far as educated guesses goes.