The stars finally aligned and gave us a weekend where we could tackle the last major hurdle, the finish...
There were a couple of steps along the way up to this point that had us quite worried, but ended up not being as bad as we imagined. The finishing however, is much worse. I'll let the pictures do the talking.
Prepped and sanded to the best of our ability. A gloss black finish will by all accounts only be as good as the wood surface you apply it to. At this point we would have told you that the surface looks pretty damn good.
Grey primer applied, mostly to sand back and get as flat a surface as possible. We were dumbfounded by the amount of little surface imperfections that the matt grey finish made apparent.
The "spray booth"
In the words of Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs: "Safety third!"
Sanded and ready for colour
Black applied! It looks particularly orange peely in the photo. It wasn't as bad as it looks, plus it looked better after leaving it overnight to dry a bit more.
Next we had to scrape the paint of the bindings. This is were the proverbial hit the fan. It took us this much until we realized that this was going to be one helluva job.
I don't know whether it's the nitro we used, whether we put it on too thick, too thin, let it dry too much or too little, but it does
NOT scrape as easily as per the video of the little old lady scraping bindings on 335's in the Gibson factory. Scraping the f-hole wasn't what I'd term a relaxing morning's work either.
We tried scraping clean lines but every now and then the paint would chip/tear a little bit past the binding line, exposing wood. There's quite a bit of drop filling repair work that needs to happen before moving on to clear. It's only really visible close up, but we want nice clean lines.
Despite this, from a distance it does look pretty cool though. ?
Neither of us has ever sprayed any sort of colour finish before, so at this point we don't really have any idea how this will look when done. How will the black look under the clear coat? Will we be able to polish it up to a smooth wet glassy black? Who knows! If we get to the end and we're not happy we can always sand it all off and start again... ?
And finally, installed the tuners on the neck, so I'll post a few more beauty shots of the headstock.
Quite a productive weekend of work, although my right hand thumb keeps reminding me of the hours of binding scraping! ?
