Drak Build: The Sonic Crayon

[Bizman62]

47 minutes ago, Prostheta said:

I'm still overwhelmed that you shot nail polish.

Why not? I've been told that it's nitrocellulose. I've also been told that nitro is a common finish for guitars and that it can be sprayed either from rattle cans or spray guns.

https://cen.acs.org/articles/86/i32/Nail-Polish.html

[Drak]

6 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

Why not? I've been told that it's nitrocellulose.

It's not, I'm reasonably nearly certain nail polish is acrylic lacquer, not nitro.

But it IS lacquer, it says so right on the bottle.

So what I do is dump the bottle in my spray can, and add my usual thinner.

But I never mix my (nitro) lacquer into the mix, just thinner so it'll shoot out the gun.

Then I let it dry thoroughly (at least 24 hours) before shooting nitro clearcoats over it.

It's totally safe as long as you keep them chemically separated by not mixing them and letting each  one dry before adding the other.

Apparently the thinner doesn't care, nitro is nitro to the thinner.

The nail polish, I'm guessing, has drying agents in it.

Because it dries really, really fast, and that would make perfect sense when you consider the primary application (women's nails)

They use airbrushes in nail salons to do nails as typical, so I can certainly bust that party up and hijack the womens' goods.

[Drak]

1 hour ago, Prostheta said:

I'm still overwhelmed that you shot nail polish.

Uhhh, ever heard of Mary Kay White?

Where do you think they got the Mary Kay from?

I learned all of these tips from Dan Earlwine decades ago, he's my sensei, pretty much.

[Prostheta]

If you'd read the label on the nail polish, that's exactly what it said.

Looks like the correct pink for a rare steak.

[Prostheta]

1 hour ago, Drak said:

Because it dries really, really fast, and that would make perfect sense when you consider the primary application (women's nails)

 

Yes, because hanging in the cupboard for two weeks until you can't smell solvent offgassing is grounds for divorce and/or criminal conviction.

[ScottR]

4 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

That colour looks like something you'd not want to see in your toilet bowl. It's like a combination of diarrhea, intestinal bleeding and hemorrhoids.

It looked bronze on my monitor.....not that I'd want to pass bronze either.

SR

[komodo]

28 minutes ago, ScottR said:

It looked bronze on my monitor.....not that I'd want to pass bronze either.

SR

Especially if you typically poop gold. Then, it would be quite upsetting. Even Silver would suck, because everyone knows that coming in second is first loser.

[Bizman62]

7 hours ago, Drak said:

It's not, I'm reasonably nearly certain nail polish is acrylic lacquer, not nitro

Well, the Internet can be wrong. By a quick search only one site mentioned a water based product as an alternative. This one seemed to go in depth about the difference of nail polish and nail lacquer: https://www.difference.wiki/nail-polish-vs-lacquer/

For those who don't like a four minute read, the conclusion was that the main difference is how the nitro has been thinned.

[Prostheta]

It's also worth considering that the terms are not necessarily consistent across the product industry. What one manufacturer insists is a lacquer may vary from another. We're not talking professional or industrial products here....!

[Drak]

9 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

That colour looks like something you'd not want to see in your toilet bowl.

So, I think that's a 'bit' extreme and maybe influenced by the cameras' interpretation, its just red with black after all, which is black cherry.

However, I can induce a small but valuable finishing lesson into this.

I used 4 drops of black dye, and 3 drops of black pigment, and there is a difference.

The reason it went so dark is due to the amount of pigment multiplied by the amount of coats, not the dye.

With dye, you can shoot coat after coat and it won't change the darkness or opacity much.

With pigment, totally different story.

The more coats you shoot a (black) pigmented color, the darker it will get, the red portion be damned.

If I had just used dye, it may have come out OK, the pigment is what did me in.

If I could have shot only one coat with the pigment and got saturation, it probably would have been OK.

But it took, I think, 5 coats to get saturation, with the pigment multiplying itself with each coat.

[Drak]

I'm finishing up the neck and doing the detail clean-up of the body from the shoot.

IMO, clean, crisp color blocking jobs are far harder than the most intricate 12-step burst I've ever done. This is about my 4th or 5th one, so I have a little experience under my belt and know pretty much what to expect by now. There is a tremendous amount of detail work that always needs to be done following the shoot, where in bursting everything blends into everything else in one big orgy of overlap.

In Color-blocking, The Eye Sees and Catches Any and All Imperfections.

Every last square inch of the job needs to be inspected from very close-up, and the overall look from a distance, both count and are important. On the neck alone, once I pulled tape and inspected it, there were several areas I wasn't 100% happy with, so I had to do a quick re-tape and re-shoot to get 'the look' where I was really happy with it. Ratios and proportions and correct angles that look amazing against each other, in balance. So before anything else, the initial inspection is concerned with the lines and angles and if the basic job is up to par before going any further and if corrections need to be made, they need to be made now.

Then, once tape has been permanently pulled, Razor blade detailing first to clean up any imperfections in the lines. Any tiny bits or flecks of overspray (there are always some, and the eye sees them all). Then a Very Thorough Naptha wipe over the entire thing. The thinner in the lacquer reacts with the adhesive from the tape and transfers the adhesive to the body and leaves it as a sticky gummy residue. This only happens nearest the edges, where the thinner goes down the wettest and so doesn't evaporate immediately and so has time to react with the adhesive under the tape. All of that needs to be cleaned up with Naptha. If you miss One spot and go over that with a clearcoat, you sir, are underwater.

Once the lines have been razored clean of any imperfections, and the Naptha has cleaned all the tape residue, sometimes the tape leaves strange impressions on the lacquer. Nearly invisible, but when you're inspecting up close and personal, you always see them. So a really super-light scuff sanding with a 500 Abralon pad usually smoothes all of that out and readies the job for the clearcoats.

None of this is required with a burst or a single solid color.

I conclude that color blocking jobs that comes out really clean and crisp take more time, patience, and attention to detail than most burst jobs ever do.

[ScottR]

53 minutes ago, Drak said:

clean, crisp color blocking jobs are far harder than the most intricate 12-step burst

Amen brother!

SR

[Drak]

The Color Explosion Police are on the way here with horns and sirens blazing.

Officers Green, Blue, and Yellow have reported to me they are in transit, pedal to the floor with an All Alerts Bulletin posted.

I'll take a pic with the pickguard template later on to give things some perspective.

Its all planned out, I can see the entire thing finished, this is just the background.

I wanted to get some clearcoats on it so I can breath a bit easier, then I'll re-shoot the Floyd cavity (again), then more clear.

[Drak]

I might white-out the bit on the neck pocket edges.

I had planned to 'wrap' the red and continue it on the heel of the neck itself, so there was 'flow'.

But (lazy-ass me) decided it was too much work and effort for too little payoff.

I like what I did at the top, and the brain will fill in the missing transition.

So I'll probably do a quick white-out of the neck pocket. Probably.

[Bizman62]

13 hours ago, Drak said:

The Eye Sees and Catches Any and All Imperfections.

Decades ago when my eyesight still was as perfect as it could be I noticed that the human eye is surprisingly accurate in finding any anomalies, be it the tiniest quirk in a line, straight or curved, or a mismatching angle or mismatching proportions or any discontinuity. The issue may not be obvious at first glance but somewhere in the brain a tiny voice starts muttering that it's not right. You surely know what I mean!

[Prostheta]

That little voice turns into a grumpy loud one after a while! "This isn't how things used to be!"

I find that the eye is excellent at dividing into two. That of itself can be used as a device to increase accuracy when measuring and marking out by hand.

[Drak]

Some Belew song titles: Big Electric Cat, Sexy Rhino, Elephant Talk, Ballet for a Blue Whale. UmmHmm...

 

[Drak]

The first merrymakers are arriving, the Big Ticket headliners still en route, stuck in traffic.

Still developing the background.

The deftness required to pull the tape only entrusted to the Left Hand fingers, of course.

While the neanderthal-like functions of taking pics relegated to the lobotomized right hand fingers.

And Mr. Floyd has resumed his natural appearance again.

[Drak]

When I said Sonic Crayon, I wasn't f-ing kidding, eh?

Second pic I took to show what happens in color blocking all the time, especially on bends and corners.

The little nigglies that always need to be attended to.

This is a typical razor blade cleanup thing, 5 minutes maybe, you'll never see it.

I stopped there for the day, I'll pick it back up and continue the line on the back another day.

There's enough red (already) and green (coming) to satisfy the scheme, I didn't need any more of either of them, so yellow and blue are the accent colors.

I had to get some yellow next to the red in total hero-worship Ode to Adrien and Paul.

All the colors are bouncing off of each other just like I wanted everything to w/o looking like an Adrien copycat.

But yet, the basic theme/idea is definitely there.

Cheers fellas.

[Drak]

So I decided to go active on this one too.

I've had an EMG VMC control (Google it) in the drawer for years.

It's called a Variable Mids Control (duh), but you may as well call it a parametric EQ.

It has two ganged pots, and boosts or cuts selected frequencies between 100hz and 1khz.

One pot selects the frequency, the other either boosts or cuts that frequency.

I always like boosting around the 800hz area, so it should be great.

I had to re-configure the pickguard for 3 knobs as if I have a choice I only ever use vol/tone.

But also, its not the mega-5-knob setup that I usually do for an EMG build, just one additional (dual-ganged) pot.

Just have to figure if I feel like cutting out a hole for a battery box or stuff it under the guard.

[Drak]

You can see with the neck attached (sort of) how the red curves around from one side of the body and comes up the other side of the neck.

I love that. I love it.

I slapped the original pickguard on it for reference, but this isn't what's going on it, tho I 'could' use it as a second, it 'does' work.

What's coming is going to be much mo' bettah.

 

 

 

[Prostheta]

A VMC is a great choice. I've been stuck on the idea of an SVR (state variable filter) as a variable mid/LPF for a few years. Being able to re-characterise a pickup is awesome.

[Bizman62]

6 hours ago, Drak said:

I slapped the original pickguard on it for reference, but this isn't what's going on it, tho I 'could' use it as a second, it 'does' work.

That actually matches with the Calvin and Hobbes strip on today's paper: Calvin didn't have the right coloured crayon so he mixed several ones for a perfect barf.

[Drak]

8 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

so he mixed several ones for a perfect barf.

Had to Google that.

"The BARF (Biologically Appropriate Raw Food Diet) is an alternative raw diet designed to provide puppies with a modified homemade diet that consists of raw muscle meat and bones, as well as vegetables and fruits while eliminating all processed foods."

[Bizman62]

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