Current Fixations (Pt. 1)

Refinishing

Work has been slow lately so here's what has been occupying my time.

I had one last guitar available to me to paint - my 1989 MIK Squier II Stratocaster. This was my first ever electric guitar purchased from Arnill's Music. Using money I made from doing yard-work at Aunty Rita's house and with Ernie topping off the difference I finally had this black beauty. I loved that guitar so much I memorized the serial number (still know it!) and made a glass case for it. (Nerd!) Check out those cool stickers I made with some sign vinyl and an xacto knife in grade 9. haha

Notice the broken E tuner. I found a new set of tuners from a guy on offset-guitars.com. Got a good deal on them but they were too large for the existing holes. Enter Uncle Evert who widened the holes for a perfect fit and routed out the body cavity for the new pickguard too.


Here it is taken apart:

And sanded down:


And taped up:


Six weeks later...right after sanding and sanding and sanding and buffing. This is my best paint job yet. No sand-throughs! I was extremely happy.

Krylon's 'Fairytale Pink':

Indoor lighting:

And outdoors:


And now the sad news. I tried using a cheap type of gloss and a week or two after I did the final buffing these weird scratches and a 'fog' of sorts began to show in places. I'm not redoing it so I'll just pass it off as a 'relic'. haha

For those of you not familiar with the idiotic guitar market, to relic a guitar is to take a perfectly fine guitar and scratch it up with a belt sander, age the parts in muriatic acid, sit it in the sun to fade the paintjob, stuff it in a box of lit cigarettes and wear the fretboard down in an attempt to make it look like they used the guitar for decades in smoky dives. In a word, Dumb.


I don't mind the look of a well played guitar, but get that look from PLAYING THE GUITAR! Anyway, enough nerdy talk. What has been keeping you busy?