Back to the body. I had a concept in my head, so the next task was to figure out just what it was. I went through a whole bunch of fonts and finally settled on these two.
And when I saw them actually placed against the guitar, the second was the clear choice to me.
And then the pickup rings.
They say on the forums, that yours plans will change… And they’re right. I had originally planned a full pickguard for this one…
And I still like it. But then I got to thinking “how about a half pickguard?”, and then “what about no pickguard?”. To be honest, I’m now leaning towards no pickguard, but that may change yet again.
The body has been epoxied. Let the sanding begin.
And a little scraping.
Primer is on.
And the black. Now I wasn’t really happy with how the paint was laying down out of the gun. It’s been a very long time since I’ve used a spray gun, and it sure isn’t like riding a bike… It doesn’t come right back. But at this point, the deadline was looming, so I had to go with it.
And of course, because I’m working on a deadline, I just had to do an inlay on the fretboard rather than a decal.
Again, not perfect. You can see where I had to fill around the rosewood with maple dust. I’ll have to keep working on this part, but now I have time to practice.
And then a test of my long-lost airbrush skills. YAY!!! Something finally turned out just as I had imagined!
And then the painful part. The frets just wouldn’t stay in. Even with glue. When I had cut the frets deeper (after gluing up the fretboard) I failed to keep the saw perfectly straight as I cut. I should have known I couldn’t do that! I’ve never been able to saw straight without a guide. And packing them with dust and glue didn’t help either, so off comes the fretboard. This is really the only pic of this process. I felt far too rushed to sit and take pics of each step. Maybe in the future I’ll look at this again with the idea of a tutorial in mind… Maybe.
Needless to say, I did a new fretboard, slotted it to full depth while still in the jig, and glued it up and all that. More coming soon.