So one of my favorite things about my life right now is that, being a full-time grad student and having full-time employment at the same university, there are two or three times per year where the stars align and i have absolutely NOTHING in terms of responsibilities for weeks at a time. This break i did not have work or class for a 3.5 week stretch, and to go from having to be at school about 70 hours per week to 0 frees up quite a bit of time for projects. I used this time to get better at finishing, by working on a few things for friends (and a bit for myself :icon_biggrin
:
Here's the lowdown on each of these projects:
This is the maple/maple neck i ordered from the showcase recently for my daphne blue strat. My technique for this borrowed pretty heavily from Tonar's method for painting the AAAAA Cherry Bomb neck, where i started with Linseed Oil to make the little birdseyes pop a bit before hitting the neck with amber tint and then nitro. One thing i'm really pumped about is that i used gloss nitro for the front, back, and sides of the headstock and satin nitro for the fretboard & neck back. I'm thrilled with how it turned out:
Next is the surf green tele body i did for my pal. I actually painted it in October, so it's been curing and i was able to finally wetsand it with my time off. Here is a pic of the wetsanding after 800-grit:
The same pal asked if i would refin his MIM strat daphne because he liked mine so much. Here it is after the final coats of clear were applied:
I also refinned another friend's JagStang. This is actually a really fun project. He and his wife are teaching in South America this year, so he left the guitar with me and asked me to "make it sweet". I've been making suggestions for parts, and he orders them and has them shipped to me. Then when they get home in June I'll present him with his finished guitar. He decided he wanted it refinned in Lake Placid Blue. I don't have all the clear on it yet, and in this pic you can see a few spots where i've spot-sanded the last clear coat i applied, but you get the idea:
Finally, i painted a couple pedal enclosures for GGG kits i'm working on. Believe it or not, the base colors on both pedals are the same color, but on the green one i just applied a shitload of tinted clear to it until it was this really cool shade of green. Then i wanted to get some practice working on stripes. The blue one was my first attempt and you can definitely see that it's not perfect, but i think i did a lot better on the other one (though i guess it was an easier stripe to do):
So, now it's back to the grind of another semester, but this sure was a lot of fun.
:
Here's the lowdown on each of these projects:
This is the maple/maple neck i ordered from the showcase recently for my daphne blue strat. My technique for this borrowed pretty heavily from Tonar's method for painting the AAAAA Cherry Bomb neck, where i started with Linseed Oil to make the little birdseyes pop a bit before hitting the neck with amber tint and then nitro. One thing i'm really pumped about is that i used gloss nitro for the front, back, and sides of the headstock and satin nitro for the fretboard & neck back. I'm thrilled with how it turned out:
Next is the surf green tele body i did for my pal. I actually painted it in October, so it's been curing and i was able to finally wetsand it with my time off. Here is a pic of the wetsanding after 800-grit:
The same pal asked if i would refin his MIM strat daphne because he liked mine so much. Here it is after the final coats of clear were applied:
I also refinned another friend's JagStang. This is actually a really fun project. He and his wife are teaching in South America this year, so he left the guitar with me and asked me to "make it sweet".
I've been making suggestions for parts, and he orders them and has them shipped to me. Then when they get home in June I'll present him with his finished guitar. He decided he wanted it refinned in Lake Placid Blue. I don't have all the clear on it yet, and in this pic you can see a few spots where i've spot-sanded the last clear coat i applied, but you get the idea:
Finally, i painted a couple pedal enclosures for GGG kits i'm working on. Believe it or not, the base colors on both pedals are the same color, but on the green one i just applied a shitload of tinted clear to it until it was this really cool shade of green. Then i wanted to get some practice working on stripes. The blue one was my first attempt and you can definitely see that it's not perfect, but i think i did a lot better on the other one (though i guess it was an easier stripe to do):
So, now it's back to the grind of another semester, but this sure was a lot of fun.
