drewtimfan

I got the 2 part bleach from the hardware store. I have made 4 applications now. It is working little by little but its nothing spectacular. I have been sanding like crazy. Hopefully it will make it through

So I started a new refinish. I have done 2 guitars before, but this is my first refinish. Swamp/Ash Maple body. Finally got all the paint off the body. I was going for a natural finish. The plan was to tru-oil the whole thing. However, I laid down a coat of black alcohol based analinel i obviously did this to try to bring out the flame on the maple and the grain on the swamp ash. Here's the thing: I mixed too much powder in with too little dye. So it was a very concentrated mixture. I only did one coat, now I can't get all of the dye off of the body. I started out trying to sand it by hand, went all the way down to 60 grit. I then moved to trying to pour some lacquer thinner over it; this got some of it off. I then used the last bit of my chemical paint remover. This did nothing of course. Then I moved to power sanding. This took most of the black pigment out, but I am left with a grayish tint. There is still alot of dye left there. I tried to put some water on the body to raise the grain, this did not help. My last resort was bleach. I got a two part wood bleach and made my first application about 3 hours ago, so far it has really done nothing. It made the exposed wood lighter in bad splotches, but has not lightened any of the dye. What can I do? Keep sanding and sanding and sanding? The gray remnants of dye just won't go away. I feel like I ruined my favorite guitar. Is there anything I can do?

I havent had much luck laquering my guitars, i always mess up. I have a guitar that I painted translucent orange. Can i apply tung oil or another type of oil over the paint? What would be the best oil to use for this application?

Hey guys I got everything working thank god. Thanks for all your help. When i start playing it there is virtually no noise. And when i bring the guitar close to me body the single coil hum goes totally away

If I adjust the tone pot, it gets better. But I have found that the tone cap cuts the frequency it buzzes at. I was putting it back together and trying to fit all the wires into the cavity and the tone pot somehow got crushed. So i have to replace that today. I will let you guys know when I assemble it again. The buzz seemed to go away when i started putting it back together. I'll put all back together and see what happens

I have a dr.z and an orange. I tried using both amps. They both have 3 prong ground style plug... I have my electronics plugged into a surge protector that checks for proper ground, so I don't think that is an issue. I will try plugging it in to my brother's amp at a different outlet.

I just finsidhed reshielding the guitar. The hum did get quiter. But the buzz is definately still there. And it goes down like always when i touch ground. And the switch knobs and pot knobs are noisy too. I feel like the biggest idiot, this isn't really that hard, but it is a nightmare to me

What would my new problem be a symptom of? It gets quiet when i touch ground/

I just got a new martin Hd-28v. The setup on it is marginal. It plays in tune, but the action is pretty bad. I am using medium strings on it and it just doesn't play comfortably. I put some light gauge on there and it feels great, but I have a problem playing with light gauge strings. So i guess i have to file the saddle down a little bit. But I am not too familiar with what i need to do. I was planning to file the back/bottom of the saddle down just a little bit. But I don't know how much it will mess up the guitar's intonation. Please advise me as to what I should do. thanks

the buzz is different from the single coil hum. The hum is always there from the pickups. But when I touch the ground, the buzz goes away. It is just a buzz over the hum. So we have hmmmmmmmmmmmm and bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. When i touch the ground no more bzzzzz, just hmmmmmmm.

OKay well i just about solved all my problems. But of course one problem leads to another with me. The hot wire that went from the rhythm switch had a little soler spill over and touch the switch case. This was causing it to be hot. I fixed everything and was getting ready to put the pickguard on when i noticed that now there is a little buzz all the time, but when i touch the ground circuit it stops buzzing. Thanks for your help guys, hopefully i will figure this one out on my own. Thanks again.

Yeah used different cords. But I have an update. I was using jacks with three terminals. Dind't know there was much of a difference. So i got a jack with two terminals. Wired it up one by one and got all the way through with everything. No buzzes on the ground circuit. But the hot circuit does buzz when it is touched. I called seymour duncan and they said this was normal. So that leaves me with one last problem. The rhythm circuit switch is connected to the pickuard through screws. The switch has no ground. It isn't supposed to be grounded. Now everytime i touch the screws on the pickguard it buzzes not much, but you can still hear it. Duncan told me to ground the casing, but the whole switch is hot, so when i ground it, it kills the circuit. So it is just left to figure out how to not get the screws to buzz. Somehow use electrical tape to keep the metal from touching?

Well after a long weekend of shows, I came back to work on the jazzmaster. I wired both pickups directly to the output jack. Hot to hot; Ground to Ground. The pickups were getting output, but when i touched the ground wire it made the same noise. Now i guess this tells us that it is the pickups. They are brand new straight from the seymour duncan custom shop. So i doubt there is something wrong with the pickups. At least i should hope so for $175 pickups. So the only thing I can think of is that the shielding of the pup cavities is making it noisy. That is the only place that the shielding is left. I don't know though. What do you think guys? Lovekraft?

I tried wiring just selector, volume, tone, output jack. Didn't make a difference. Tried selector, volume, output jack. Same thing. Both potentiometers work. They meter right 987k and 975k. They work. It doesn't get noisy when the tone control is all the way rolled off. When I grounded the cap to the star ground, and also to the tone pot, the noise went off. But in this case the noise went away, but the tone control doesn't work. So this makes me think that it is a potentiometer problem. But it would seem if they meter correctly and work correctly when connected right, it would be hard to peg this as the problem. I guess I will try different pots and post the results

Here is another update: I isolated everything part of the system. First I took out the rhythm switch(switches between two sets of volume/tone controls). Still got noisy when i touched ground. Then I took out the phase and series switch. Didn't make a difference. Took off the tone pot. Same problem Used a different pot for volume, with no tone control wired. Still the noise when i touch it. Everything is working properly, just noise when i touch the ground. Here are my only last thoughts: 1- I have never used a les paul style selector before. There a 4 terminals. I used the left terminal for bridge. Right terminal for neck. And the two middle terminals i soldered together and sent out to volume pot. Maybe this is not right???? 2- Just deal with the problem. It won't matter if it hums when i touch a part of the ground if the bridge is not grounded. 3- This problem is normal(which i can't fathom is true). Because at one point i finagled it to where it didn't get noisier. But when i finagled it, either the tone control or rhythm switch didn't work. 4- By some weird hex on me, all the components I have used are somehow bad.