paintin' it up real nice

So in my last installment, i showed you a picture of the wood with its previous crappy paint job splayed all over its hapless form. The poor thing was scared. Its last owner had chopped and scraped it all up on purpose to make it appealing to chronofetishists. After much sanding, I was able to bring it back to its pure form. But now it lay naked, frightened even, before me. So here's how we went about restoring this fine piece of swamp ash.

1.) Purchased 3 bottles of nitro lacquer from "Reranch" -- a place on the internet that sells nitro-paint products in aerosol cans. Ingenious! I bought one honey-blond, one black, one clear-coat nitro. Check them out, they have really cool stuff, and great instructions in their forums.

2.) Moved it to the porch, and laid down layer after layer of the honey-blond. Here it is painted up real nice:


I didn't do a prime coat first, because ash is a dense wood, and doesn't always require a primer coat. I just went straight spray-can to wood.

So this, if I wanted, could be the end, and I'd have a pretty straight-f0rward classic looking telecaster. But I wanted to do something a little more edgy.

3.) So I grabbed the black can, and kinda attempted a sort of burst outwards from the center, with the edges darker black. The result was as follows:

Not too too shabby. It's hard to do this by hand, an I feel the "burst" effect towards the bottom is very uneven. Aerosol cans can be tricky with this kinda shit, and it was kinda spitting out unevenly at points. What I'm gonna do, is pick the two trouble areas at the bottom, mask everything else off, and lightly spray a little more black on, to even everything out more. There's also some funky stuff going on in the edges I'm going to have to sand down, and respray black, but shouldn't be a problem.

The back was a little trickier, as it had picked up alot of newspaper from the TOP of the guitar's sides getting sprayed. So it looked like this:It all had to be sanded off. Big pain. Then it got its turn in my hi-tech workshop:
I'd say for the most part, I'm done with the painting. I just have to do 3 changes - 1.) clean up the bursting on the guitar's lower half 2.) Sand and re-paint some yellow showing through the black on the lower side 3,) Sand and re-paint some yellow should through the black on the top side.

After that, I can get into the nitro-finish. That's what I'm truly dreading. Apparently you have to do all these coats, and then wet-sand them in between. It just sounds like a bitch of a job. This whole refinishing nonsense is NOT what I originally intended to do, but now that it's almost done, I'm kinda glad it happened. The more of the project I put together myself, the more the guitar is truly mine.

I'm gonna try to wrap up the painting this weekend, let it dry out real good over the week, and then start doing the nitro clear-coat finishes next weekend. Once that's all finished, I'll have to start picking up the nuts and bolts to put this sucker together: pickguard, tone pots, selector switch, bridge plate, bridge saddles, etc. And the biggest decision of them all: What pickups to use? I have a brand in mind, but we'll have to see if I can get lucky off craigslist, cause they're expensive.

until later.

Parts-Caster

Hello,

I'm making a telecaster from parts I buy off of Ebay and Craigslist, and have decided to blog about this.

I am not going to make the body.
I am not going to make the neck.

Why would you assume I'd do so much work? Is it because you're an ass hole?

I will fit the neck to the body, probably do some wood-filling/patching, install the electronics and hardware myself, and attempt a decent setup. Along the way, I'll be explaining the reasons motivating my preferences and choices.

Some of these choices will be based on what I think will produce the best sounding guitar. I'll go into detail about different tones I want to produce, and some ideas about what sounds "good" and why. I'll try to place this in a mildly historical context of modern popular music as well.

Yet some more of these choices will be based on my expansive and preternatural knowledge of Rock n' Roll music, and what is good for it.

Yet even some more will be based on my impeccable aesthetic sense of what disparate parts will make a cool guitar once clumsily glued, screwed, or soldered together ("Glued and screwed" did I just write the tag line for the next Larry the Cable Guy movie?).

As I am the fucking man, it probably behooves you to read every one of my posts twice. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Maybe pull out a dictionary and buy my seperately sold Cliff Notes to help you cut through some of the subtext.

Please hold tight my hand, gird your loins, double-check to make sure you girded them up REAL nice, and take the first steps of this journey with me...as I build a telecaster.