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Drak

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Everything posted by Drak

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Every person has different character traits, different aspects of their personality. I watched a few of his YT's, he always has something interesting hanging behind him. Not like I don't see tons of idiotic YT'rs with guitars in the background 'to be cool', which just makes me laugh at them, not with them. Because, well, you're a stupid phony jackass trolling for likes, of course. But I do pay attention to these things, and saw a few behind him that looked really creative. Straight-up on his own, just his own ideas, no EVH connection. So, yeah, I would believe he's that detail oriented in everything he builds. There's no evidence I can see that he wouldn't be.
  8. So, I can show this much w/o really handing over the goods. This is just the background, but the red was important to get in there, and it's not done yet. I'll have to re-shoot the Floyd Cavity again, no big deal, got it covered. But...can you believe how I screwed the first spray up? Its Horrible. Ackkkkkkkkkk! DUDE, WHAT (TF) WERE YOU THINKING??? OK, Recovery initiated, all is well, and an added bonus ...my nails look damn Spectacular!
  9. I loved that YT @komodo, I was completely transfixed and glued to the screen the entire time, from beginning to end. That was an amazing detective story.
  10. Small setback after 3 (freakin!) hours of taping up the body (again). I decided to add a few small drops of black pigment to the Big Apple Red to darken it just slightly. Wellsir, that was a mistake right there. Came out like a Black Cherry look (duh...) Too dark, it lost the 'fun and cheery' look (you know, the LEGO look). BUT, I shoot color coats like that paper, paper, paper thin. So, off to the nail section of WalMart for another bottle of Big Apple Red. With no additives this time.
  11. How close to the line can I get w/o giving anything away? Pretty close...we're creeping right up to the edge...
  12. I needed a good opaque solid red lacquer so I went lacquer shopping today. Nearly all my supplies are trans dyes with a few exceptions, but I don't have any solid red pigments. Big Apple Red. Perfect red for what I need. Its nice to know there's always custom colored lacquers right around the corner, even on a Sunday.
  13. I made the truss rod cover for it this morning. If I show ANY of it, it will give everything away, so I cannot. This is going to be a surprise unveiling when the day gets here. So I think its going undercover for awhile. But the plan is completely solidified, I'm crazy happy with it now, and I always need 'that', I need that excitement. After a year gazing at the damn thing over and over, wondering what to do with it. This is a big difference, now it can gain much needed forward momentum because I can now clearly see the final product. Green, yellow, red, blue, its all in there. And its going to look awesome, and it will faithfully represent my original interpretive blended ideas from Belew and Gilbert. I found a way to congeal it all and make it look like me at the same time, that was no easy task.
  14. I like those pics, it made me realize how much the white would have faded by now. Which I really like, that aged and faded and slightly yellowed white, much better than a real pure white. If I was doing that, I would probably have to spend an entire afternoon adjusting and tinting white to find that look. Just looking at it, I couldn't just vomit up a color recipe. I would have to try a few mixes to find and discover what blend would look like that. Its interesting looking at the back at the trem pocket, how narrow the area around the block is. I've never installed or used a regular trem, it's always been Floyd or nothing for me. So the area around the block is generally fairly wider.
  15. I'm totally on-board with that observation. If the masses have caught on to it, you can count me right out, I wouldn't get anywhere near it. And I would never use a guitar with a reflector on it, much less a dozen slapped and crammed onto it. Gives me the heebs just thinking about it. I mean, when things get to this level of mass consumption and hysteria...
  16. Didn't Eddie use Schwinn bicycle paint or something like that? BTW, I think I know why you did the b/w instead of the r/b/w. So you didn't have to put all those reflectors on the back.
  17. So I think I finally got this baby figured out. The 'link' to Gilbert and Belew were their use of bold, basic colors. Like in a crayon box (Sonic Crayon, get it?) Like, in your face bold colors, not bursts or gradual fades or anything like that. Bold, basic, in your face color 'blocks', whatever that block is, a geometric shape, squares, triangles, or whatevers... And the colors I wanted to use are the basic building block colors: Blue, Yellow, Green, Red. Not tangerine, or purple, or aquamarine, or magenta, or fuchscia, but the basic building block colors. And it had to look Good. Thats whats been going through my brain for all these months driving me half-crazy. And I just could not figure out how to incorporate those colors And have it look like 'Me' all at the same time. But I think I finally got it, yes I do. Will take a few weeks for a certain something to arrive to make everything happen. Maybe you should be scared, maybe very scared... Got the Floyd cavity blacked out.
  18. I ordered the Gotoh GE-1996-T (Floyd) trem kit and locking nut yesterday (gold), it's been highly recommended in some circles. I've read the studs are reasonably larger than an OFR and the string locking screws are a bit longer than a OFR. So I'll just have to wait until it gets here to see if the route needs to be modified in any way before install, hopefully not. And I have to route the neck for the locking nut shelf now. Better to get that out of the way before I retire the guns in case there's any touchup needed there. Probably should have made the shelf first, but whatever... Mock-Up body and neck
  19. So I still had some Nutmeg/Blood Red/Black mix in the burst gun, hadn't cleaned it out yet. I decided to do the back of the neck too, which was just a light brown color. I had bursted the front/back of the headstock, but not the whole neck, so I decided to do that. I ran the gun down both side edges, then ran it from bottom to middle, and the top I stopped around the headstock area. So, its a burst of a sort. The finishing portion is done now, got 5 clearcoats on both body and neck. It now totally matches the body in shade and color.
  20. I've been doing a little bit of research on the guy lately. I had no idea he played so many weird-ass looking guitars there for a certain time frame. You wouldn't have to try very hard to hit 'alien timeline variant EVH' model, plenty to choose from.
  21. BTW, Dave Friedman completely shot down my theory of hot PAF/early, super-hot wind later. He said after the 25 pickup shootout/Pete Thorn YT they did, they came to the exact opposite conclusion. DiMarzio SD for early, and hot PAF 9k for later years.
  22. There's a new Tone Talk out w/ Dweezil, who's (obviously) a huge Eddie fan. Dweezil - Tone Talk Episode
  23. I was rummaging around in my EMG box to see if I had all the required pieces (the AfterBurner, EXG, & SPC pots) The last three builds I've done were all hybrid passive-active, oddly enough, the two Garcias and the Super-Satchurator. I robbed the EMG harnesses off of older Tele builds that I had cut up and tossed away...those EMG pots aren't exactly cheap. Amazingly enough I had exactly one left of everything I needed, new in boxes in the EMG drawer. 'Oh, look at that, an Afterburner, the last one'. 'Oh look at that, an SPC, the last one'. I didn't have any EXG's, but I did have two RPC's, which is kind of close to an EXG. An EXG is like a happy face EQ curve, it boosts highs and lows and cuts mids at the same time. The RPC boosts highs, but not lows, and doesn't cut mids so, close enough. It's basically a treble booster. Especially in a 2-HB guitar where boosting lows isn't really necessary, that will work fine. This will probably be the last hybrid EMG active build then, I don't have any more bodies drilled for it and don't really feel like buying any more of them. But it was nice and surprising to find exactly one left of everything I needed to fill this out.
  24. The two pictures before the very last one look more authentic to me. The red looks darker, more like dried blood, the last pic just looks like red paint splatter. Maybe its just the flash effect. What is the message or theme you're trying to capture with this? Is it supposed to represent some particular gruesome event or violence of some sort? Like, out of all the themes possible, what made you want to do a blood splatter? Just curious.
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