Baritone Finishing

I don't have too many exciting pictures to show you all this week, but I am closing in on the finish of the baritone guitar. Spraying a finish on such a light guitar such as these that are made of maple makes it very difficult to see where you've covered so far. But after a couple of coats, I pretty well got the hang of it. We put an oil based grain filler on the mahogany necks, which is a rather messy job, and consists of smearing a fast drying compound into the wood that resembles a mix between chocolate pudding and red clay. Naptha is actually the base, and it dries very fast, so you must work it in quickly and begin sanding it back before you have clumps dried on the neck. We scuff it back with Scotch Brite and you continue this process all over the neck until you have achieved uniform coverage and are satisfied with the fill. Since we were not spraying any color on these guitars, we did not use the vinyl sealer coat like we did on the first guitars. However I just learned this week that they really only even do that for beginners. On their own guitars, they spray the color coats directly into the wood which makes for a very cool look, but doesn't offer much forgiveness should you mess up your sunburst.

This picture here is my baritone headstock with several coats of finish on it already. It's nothing too exciting yet, but if you enlarge the picture by clicking on it, you can take a better look at my inlay and the scribe work I did on it. Most people find this scribe work to be impossibly frustrating, but I actually really enjoyed it and did a decent job with it.

Here is the back of my head stock with 12 coats of lacquer on it as well, and still it's nothing real exciting to look at.

You can see that the grain is filled completely now, but this didn't happen until about 8 coats in. We'll have one more dry sand back, and then after two additional coats, we'll begin the wet sanding and buffing. The neck set turned out pretty well, but unfortunately, I misunderstood how that was going to happen and it turned out that the instructors did all of the work on it. We'll finish up with a little "paper pulling" where you pull sand paper under the neck heel until it fits the contour of the body perfectly.

I apologize for the angles and general quality of these pictures. The finish was still soft so I was holding the neck by the hanger while trying to take a couple pictures. This is the heel though in it's mostly final form. Well just do a bit more fitting with sandpaper like I said.

This picture shows my guitar body hanging in the spray room. Again, wet finish, so my pictures suck but if you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see the grain a little better in the sides. Or you can just be patient until my next posting when the guitar is all buffed out. For some reason, blogger.com is taking forever uploading pictures right now, and darnit cause I still had some nature pics to put up. Perhaps it is my computer, so I guess I'll post this, and then restart my computer and try again. See you soon.