pan_kara

thanks for the recommendation, will definitely check it out!

I agree that the inlay is a bit much when seen on the guitar, but man is this just soo beautiful!! Makes me really want to try inlaying something more complex than a star (that's the most adventurous I got so far) but seriously cannot imagine the amount of precision and patience that such a design would require. Congrats!

I also thought rattlecan 2K would be the perfect solution, but I can't seem to get good results with it. I have finished one body this way (Etna - the wenge-padouk baritone) but there I didn't event pore-fill and I wasn't trying to get a perfect surface. I don't remember it I even buffed it or just left it as it was. Other than that, I keep having problems. On this guitar I used 3x 200ml cans (Etna tool less than 2, but that's body only), I was going to use 2 but I decided to put a bit extra - and I got this weird thing that was super-thin and turned matte after buffing. Maybe it's just the brand, of I made some error spraying, I don't know. For me the benefit of nitro is the evaporative nature of the finish - if anything goes wrong, I can just spray a panic coat on my balcony, or spot-fill. I think the lack of proper spray space is the limiting factor for me at the moment. I have to spray outside, at work, then I don't have a good place to leave the guitar to dry etc etc all right enough complaining. temperatures are up to ~15 degrees in the day so tomorrow I'll try to put another can of nitro on the body and this should be it. The MM - I haven't checked what they are exactly. The solvent suggested for cleanup is turpentine. They do have a lot of solids in them and leave a lot of texture behind. On the water it happens if I leave them on for too long, or if they're old

totally. Not that I can compare with anything else since I never tried the other (borax+enamels) method but I got to the point where I'm pretty confident I can get a good result with Magic Marbles. If I were to do another instrument right now I'd use them again. The problems I'm having are at later stages, when clearcoating - these are due mainly to my lack of skill in that department, combined with lack of proper equipment, space etc. I'm not sure how I'd approach clearcoating if doing this again now... maybe a single can of 2k clear to lock in the color then brush on nitro? Or maybe shellac then brush on nitro? I did that in the past, just brushed so much laquer that sanding the finish flat was not an issue. Not sure how well nitro adheres to 2k poly though .. So yea, I'm not to keen on doing this again for this reason specifically - clearcoating is a huge PITA for me at the moment. Swirlng itself is super-fun on the other hand.

So in case anybody's wondering about Magic Marble compatibility with nitro - they're not compatible. As is nitro sprayed directly over MM results in the MM lifting up in crackles (or however that's called). I'm currently spraying nitro on top of what I have on the guitar (as mentioned earlier) and I did touch up the color in a few spots where I had sand-throughs that I couldn't pass on and in these spots I'm now getting some of this. As they're small I'm going brute-force on them, just leveling with sandpaper and coating over.

I used it under nitro in the past (to shield a swirl job from the nitro) and recently under 2k clear. I also used it on a figured maple neck under nitro just for the color. Works great!

hah I see you made it into an article! thanks, Carl!

Thanks, man. My hair is also on the way out. I can tell you that I actually had to redo some shots because it was showing too much Thanks for checking out my other stuff! That guitar is one of the first things I did, I wasn't ready to take up "full" building back then (and I was afraid it would take me forever to finish it) so I bought a guitar, swapped the fingerboard and did a few small mods plus the puzzle finish. There is even a thread about that here, right after I joined I appreciate the kind words about my video work - I take my time and I try to do my best .. it's a long-running hobby of mine, much longer than guitar building (but shorter than guitar playing). Actually a little bit more than a hobby from time to time...

thanks Norris. well I figured I'd make some use of the gopro .. I'd have gotten a much better shot if the container was 30 or 50cm deeper though. oops just saw that my thread is not all photobucket-upgrade-nonsense instead of photos. aw crap. will have to do a cleanup...

Still not finished, I decided to top it with a thin layer of nitro, I'm redoing the pickguard (made a new template already).. I did finish the swirl video at least:

Hah gonna be watching these! I did pretty much the exact same thing a few years ago so I can relate to all the comments about taking time to set up the camera and then the time spent managing the tens of hours of footage and distilling that to something watchable. I also ended up releasing it in episodes (otherwise I'd have never finished probably), ended up with 13 parts of 10-15 minutes each. (though mine includes a lot of talking and explanations aimed at people unfamiliar with guitar building) Good job with the first episode!

thanks for the tips @StratsRdivine! I don't think I'll be going the spray max route again, this stuff is too expensive for what it is. I even have a gun, I did spray some 2k once that I got from a luthier store in France, I might go back to this. Or nitro. I've done a classical neck refinish several months ago with spray can nitro and I'm super happy with the finish there. I think I used half a can of nitro (plus some sealer). Indeed I went through at the edge (the pressure being naturally higher there due to smaller surface under the sanding block) but I still claim my error was in having too much orange peel in the underlying shellac coat. I just had to sand too much with P1000. Anyway. I buffed the guitar but it didn't really turn very shiny, either the clearcoat was too fresh (~1 week?) or too thin. Now that the guitar served it's short-term purpose I can get back to trying to make her officially finished. I think I'll lightly scuff the finish and shoot some nitro over it (body+headstock) in hope that I can buff THAT up. I'll fix some small details here and there in the process. And order proper hardware. Meanwhile, it was perfectly fine for this:

no man, I do mean the A string - the E string is already there now, but there's going to be a higher string above it. I already have a normal 7-string with a low B so I wanted something different here. So the fan doesn't run over standard-baritone scales, the low E is 25,5' and the high string is shorter (I forget now what I used). So that I can get reasonable tension tuning a .008 string up to A. Hopefully and yea, the fan came out a bit over the top, especially with the short scale it's getting quite crammed up there. I did play two full rehearsals with it so I more or less know the places where I need to focus in order not to loose fretboard orientation. I did produce some spectacular fails at the first rehearsal

ah, I didn't see it done before (though I figured it must have been done) and yea, I also like the fact that in such approach the only complication is the fret slot cutting - I can do a double-locked floyd (with a zero-fret) - no compound scarf yay! I was also thinking of a mild 1' fan, maybe 25'-26' to just stiffen up the top a tiny bit and loosen up the bottom. Or maybe 25.5-26.5 as you say, if I put 9's on it it might be too rubbery on the top end below 25.5.. dunno yet. That's still a few months away. lol I'm in the opposite situation - got plenty of polishing equipment (not guitar-specific but still) but its the spraying that is a problem for me. It does soundcool, matte green. Can look pretty funny without all the usual reflections.

I like it, though it's not something I'd personally want to own/play but I can see the appeal. I like the one-sided fan-fret, its something I have planned for a shred-machine that I plan to build for myself where I want to have some fan + floyd rose. So one-sided fan is pretty much the only option (might push the floyd a tiny bit within the saddle intonation range maybe). You'll be doing the painting yourself?

cool, looking forward!

Alignment test: I started putting everything together on Monday so play two rehearsals on it (Tue and Thu) before the gig on Sat, and in the process I realized that some of the hardware that I was sure I had bought I in fact don't have. I knew I'm missing a tuner, but I'm also missing black strat knobs (I have a pair but they're some super-ugly old ones from somewhere), black jack plate (I have to borrow a chrome one waiting for a different strat), and [drum roll] the .008 string that was supposed to act as the high A string. And so at the moment I'm working with this contraption: its going to be amusing, playing it live. It freaks with me in so many ways ... since my fingers feel a 7-string neck they automatically think "attention! B string present!" and I have a tendency to shift all chord shapes down by one string.. on the other hand they feel the edge of the fingerboard at the treble side and expect a string to be there, so despite the A string being missing I also have a tendency to shift everything down one string at the treble side. And to top it off the fan makes me loose orientation anytime I need to suddenly make a jump to some position above the 12th fret. I guess I can't just keep it simple, can I ?

indeed, super clean. Nice detail with the round neck end in the pocket. You're keeping the wood showing there, right? (not painting it white)

So the neck is fine, I got the whole back of the neck nice and flat starting with P1000, then P1500 and then micromesh pads up to the "teal" one (4000 or 5000 or something) and this is where I'll leave it - I'll stick with this satin finish to have a faster neck. I got to the same point on the headstock, but there I will be polishing. Thank God for my auto detailing hobby : I have these denim "orange peel removal" pads that remove orange peel by polishing it off (as opposed to wetsanding) - maybe these will do a good job of reducing the orange peel on the front without digging in too deep. On the back I just painted the swirl back on for the moment: if this continues I'll accumulate enough skill to paint swirled finishes by hand lol

well this being 2k automotive paint I was expecting more build than with nitro - AFAIK on cars you just do a tack coat followed by a wet coat and that's it (or maybe 2 wet coats) - clearly its done by gun and thinned differently etc but still. A single 20 CHF can of this stuff gave me 1 tack coat and 1 full coat on day one, and I think that's as much as I've put on the wenge-padouk body I was doing some time ago (aka Etna). But here I wanted more paint to be safe so I repeated the process on the following day, then I got another can just to be safe - so I ended up with 2x-3x more clear than I (probably incorrectly) thought were "needed". My previous swirl was finished with brush-on nitro, there I really went heavy in terms of the number of thick brushed-on coats thanks, hope I'll manage to not screw it up further could be that I somehow sprayed less clear in that spot.. but really with the orange peel right next to it, there must be some extra factor. Hence my shellac suspicion. I was actually wondering how to handle the texture left behind by MM, on my previous try the paint was very uneven, but on this one it was actually pretty much flat after the dip, except for a few spots. Otherwise my plan was to shoot one coat of clear and then get it perfectly level (killing all the high spots) and use that as the base for the next coat(s). Well looks like I should have done this anyway. Lesson learned.

Fretwork in Blue: took me some time, I still suck at this, after doing something like 10 necks since I started out. But at least I managed to get rid of every last scratch in the end, though I needed to spot-sand with P400 in a few places. We'll see if this is quality fretwork when I put the strings on, but visually it's ok. well but there's also bad news. I started wetsanding the clearcoat with P1000 to prepare for polishing (it's ~5 days since spraying) and somehow I managed to go through: this is the lower corner of the body at the back - thankfully I started from the back. So I don't really understand how this was possible, you can see that 1-2cm from the sand-through I still have the "shiny spots" from leftover orange peel. I managed to get it mostly out in almost all of the back, though on the horns I fear I might be also starting to go through the color layer... I've been trying to understand what happened and the only reasonable explanation is that I'm stupid and the shellac coat that I had between the swirl and the clear had so much orange peel that what I'm trying to sand out is in fact that - not the orange peel in the clear. Its true that the shellac didn't spray very evenly and I didn't really sand it flat (because I was afraid I'd go through). I only sanded it a little bit with a P800 "shinex" pad. I'm not sure what to do with this, especially with the frond and the sides. This bit I will just mask by hand (paint the swirl) after polishing, but I don't want to repeat this - so at the moment I'm considering polishing the rest of the guitar without trying to sand the orange peel out. I think this will look better than partially-sanded orange peel - that tends to create ugly and very visible pitting after polishing, and orange peel just remains orange peel. I mean - on the pics above the guitar looks great even without polishing, orange peel is not something that's very visible unless you look really closely. I'll attempt a mirror finish again next time and meanwhile I'll continue to hate spray finishing

yes, this was the plan from the beginning - since I had no logical separation line (like on a bolt-on) actuall now I remembered that I also wanted to do this on the fingerboard and clearcoat over the frets like on a maple board .. oops. Well I guess that idea got lost somewhere along the way, at least that wasnt an important design element and fretwork will be much easier now. Maybe I even at some point conciously decided to not do that, I don't remember. But yes - at the back I wanted to just blend it in. The neck went into the water as far as it could (given the depth of my "tub") and later I did a smooth transition using turpentine. Here's a fuller shot, after coat 2: actuall coats 2 & 3, I ran out of paint in the stupid 160ml rattle can while doing coat 2 on the front of the guitar (looks like I went too heavy on the back) so I quickly drove to the local hardware store to get another one and got another one. So I ended up using 60 CHF =~60 USD in rattle-can clear, I thought two cans would cut it, but I didnt want to wreck the guitar later because of me being cheap. (like sand through due to having not enough clear etc). I'm happy to report no compatibility issues appearing, in fact I did a test on a piece of maple veneer that I dipped in the magic marple paints when testing different color combinations. That one didn't have the shellac barrier coat like the guitar has and I was spraying it in parallel - also no issues seen there. So looks like auto 2K might be compatible with magic marble.

coat #1 is on!

Looking at the weather forecast looks like I can start spraying clear tomorrow. Meanwhile: I got some Z-poxy recently from LMI to try as a pore filler, since the swirl is going onto the neck on the back and everything will be finished with full gloss clearcoat I figured I need to pore-fill the neck and headstock. Testing Z-poxy - rubbed in one coat, sanded back with P400 the following day, then another coat and sandback. Here's coat nr 2 right after application: Also, pickguard. A weird strat needs a weird pickguard: I'll probably use this as a testpiece before I make the proper one out of plexi - there are a few small cosmetic problems with this one.. but I want to have the guitar ready to play it in a show we're doing on July 15th so I'll most likely use this one then. Afterwards I'll see. Here's the hardware in place - I got 7-string singles wound for me by Zbigniew Wróblewski of Merlin Pickups (merlinpickups.com, a boutique Polish pickup company, Polish bands like Riverside and Vader use these for example). The plan is to connect them in series with an in/out-of-phase option, following Brian May's Red Special wiring, here instead of using 6 switches I can get the same set of combinations with 3x on-on-on DPDT switches. I also looked at the Red Special layout and tried to roughly position the pickups in similar spots along the strings to have similar phase cancelation+enhancement effects, for the treble strings I'm pretty close, then I diverge a bit (I didn't want to slant too much). Finally - a mockup:

I was in the market for an extractor ~3 years ago when I was moving the work from my balcony indoors and I ended up getting the Festool CTL MIDI, for something like 350 EUR. It might be something to consider as an alternative - it's not as small and convenient, it sits on the floor and rides on wheels, BUT the capacity is 12,5 liters - 3x more. And the flow is 60l/s so more like 130 CFM. There is also the MINI which is slightly cheaper but 7.5 liters.