Adding a flamed top to an Ibanez Rg body

[strawy1]

Hello everyone.

I'm new here, and i'm considering bout buying an old rg body to build my custom guitar.

What i was thinking about is a flamed maple top over an rg body.

Does anybody knows if that's possible?
Which problems could that imply?

[curtisa]

Probably the only practical solution is to apply a veneer top - a thin (1mm thick or less) sheet of veneer to the existing surface of the body.

You'd have to strip the existing finish of the body down to bare wood, devise some way of precisely aligning the two leaves of veneer and create a seamless join up the middle. Gluing the sheets will require some careful planning to execute cleanly, particularly where the curve of the arm bevel is. Once done you'll probably still have a hard edge around the perimeter of the body which will need hiding somehow, perhaps under a burst paint job.

The old Project Guitar website had a tutorial describing this exact process. By the magic of Google it is still lurking in the background here. Coincidentally the example body they use is an Ibanez Jem, close enough to an RG.