Guitar Geeks Log Week 2

So this week at guitar camp we finished up all of our clear build coats of lacquer on the electric kits, and it was time to start wet sanding, and buffing.

As you can see in this picture, the final coats of lacquer will leave an "orange peel" texture. In order to achieve a smooth, mirror-like finish, this texture must be knocked flat with sandpaper. Wet sandpaper keeps the particles of lacquer from clogging, and here at the Galloup school, they even add a generous amount of dish soap with the water to aid in the cutting process. We begin with 800 grit, sanding until no shiny spots can be seen, then we smooth it up a bit with 1,000 grit. At this point, the finish has a dull, but level appearance looking something like this...

Once all of the wet sanding is complete, it's time to buff the guitars on the first of two buffing wheels. The wheels are a cotton linen fabric and are identical in composition, but one is used with a red coarse wax, and the other is used with a fine white wax.

I don't believe that I have any pictures of the guitar directly after it was buffed on the wheels. After the buffing wheels, the guitar goes through two stages of hand buffing. One is a very fine cutting polishing compound, and the other is a drying furniture polish witch I'd say doesn't really cut as much as it just puts a nice protective coating on the finish. One word of caution with the drying furniture polish: Don't let any over spray get onto the finish without immediately rubbing it in. If it dries on the polished guitar, it's back to the red buffing wheel to get the spots off. Actually, I guess that was 32 words of caution. Anywho... Here's the guitar after the furniture polish: I have to say it looks better in person.

At this point in the week, which really wasn't moving very fast, we were given a short lecture on wiring and soldering basics and then released to mess up our own projects. Mine however actually went really well.. As did most of the guitars really, some just weren't as pretty looking inside. I didn't take pictures of my finished wiring this week, but hopefully I'll get that up soon. Here is the control plate with all of the pots and the output jack mounted up.

So now the guitars are pretty well polished, and wired, it's time to start installing all of the hardware and putting the thing together. This is where I got a bit mad at the school this week.

All of the telecaster style guitars had cute little tuning machines that installed with no trouble at all... But the basses on the other hand, such as mine, have large gnarly tuners, with spots on them that must be recessed for the tuner to seat properly on the back of the peg head.

These spots look something like this..

The tuner to the right shows the parts that must be countersunk, and the tuner to the left shows what those little "feet" are from. They are what holds that worm-drive peg in place.

So the best time to countersink these would have been before there was ever any lacquer on the guitar. We weren't even given the tuners until after the finish was sprayed and done, so I had no idea about this issue ahead of time.

They wern't going to have us countersink them at all. So without making room in the wood for those feet, the tuner sits like this...

Not cool, huh? and when you blow this image up to actual size, that gap is a lot bigger. This is by no means how the tuners were meant to be installed, and I wasn't very happy that this is what they expected us to just be happy with. So I told them. But they just tried to brush it off as if there's more than one way to do things and that there was nothing wrong with this image. They normally do not allow students to change their guitars at all, but I guess since they knew it was not how these are meant to sit, and they could see I wasn't okay with it, they told me I could fix it if I wanted on my own. So I did, and I have the only bass of three that has the tuners installed properly. I understand that this part of the program is not the highlight, and that better practices are yet to come, but seriously? This is my headstock with one tuner laid in place, and the recessions I cut visible.

Much better right? I think so, but I guess you already knew that.

Anyway, I didn't mean to cause a big stink, but I couldn't let my guitar be "done" with such a silly problem as that.

My headstock with all of the tuners in place looks like this, though I don't have a picture of the back showing my superior installation. Sorry.

That's all I have for guitar progress this week.

In other news, my neighbors still go through a 30 pack of beer a day in the other guitar cabin. One of them took a pretty hilarious spill over a split rail fence the other day. He kept the beer upright, but still spilled a little when he hit the ground; better luck next time I suppose.

Some of the locals just across the street seem to have a bit of a drug operations going on. They get a lot of random cars coming to their house. They don't seem very friendly, nor does their dog who has already bit one of the guitar students from a past term. He looks like this, but a little more Satany:

There are a couple of girls that live there who seem friendly enough. The girls are probably in their twenties. They have two goats that they take for walks on a fairly regular basis; their names apparently are Chocolate and Milkshake. The goats seem friendlier than the dog; my friend Aaron from the school goes out to pet them as they walk by. They never walk far though, barely past our house and then they turn back home, making a round trip of 200 yards.

The other day I came home from the "phone booth", my car, to find all of the guys sitting in the cabin watching TV with each and every one holding a large kitchen knife. I finally asked what was up and they supplied me with the following story: While I was gone one of the girls came walking down the road towards our cabins. My friends were out playing football in the yard and by the road when she walked up with a clipboard and began to randomly ask questions about the J F Kennedy assassination. She had the story all mixed up, but didn't seem to care to much about it anyway. When the distant sound of a car could be heard coming down the road, she split mid sentence and took off down a trail that went into their property. It's a very dense trail of tall grass and brush and you don't have to go far into it before you can't be seen from the road. After the car passed, which turned out to be me, she came booking back out of the grass, and sprinted for her house without saying another word. All we can figure is that the men in her house are not real friendly all the time and that she's not supposed to be talking to us. We've heard some fights over there, and some very strange yelling. Guess we'll sit tight for now.