SidewinderINC

Hi, thanks for taking the time to reply, ive changed all but the main pic to links, should make it easier on loading times for people, but i made the images so that all of them are only around 520kb so i thought posting them all would be fine yes, its a solid mahogany guitar, and yes i'd like to keep as much of it original as possible. as for routing out the bad sections, could you give me a link on some info about that? as that seems like a very good suggestion that i hadnt thought of before! is the general concensus (sp) to sand down to bare wood finish and restain then re coat (not sure what process to use in coating at all) EDIT after having a look around on a few different sites, i think what i may do is get the guitar down to the bare wood, if somebody could advise me on the BEST method for doing this, as the wood seems to be dyed at the moment, the neck is set in and not damaged so i dont want to disturb the finish on that. and then once clean and the main 2 problem areas sorted (i'll cross those bridges soon) Either Spray it with the Aerosol "SG Spray" from ReRanch, or Dye it with the Cherry Red dye from re-ranch and then laquer it with some of the red dye within the laquer to get a deeper finish. what would give the best results to attempt to keep a similar finish to what i have now? whats the difference between polyurethane and nitrocellulose?

Hi all, this is my first post so sorry if i havent included enough details or what have you. Over this summer, when hopefully i'll have a bit of cash and some spare time, i plan on restoring my first guitar "red"... well i couldnt call it green could i now i bought it second hand, so the majority of the knocks and the huge gouge that you'll see in a bit were already in it. but quite a lot of them are new caused by me when i was a beginner and didnt take too much care of it. i know how to clean up the neck/fretboard from reading the guide on ibanezrules which is very detailed as the neck on the guitar is fine. the rest i have no idea on how to repair it really, so here goes, i'll start with the biggest damage; http://www.44norman.f2s.com/gouge.gif now as you can see, this is a serious gouge in the beveling on the edge. i have no idea how to remedy this problem so any ideas / links would be awesome! http://www.44norman.f2s.com/chip1.gif the same as the huge gouge in a way, but as its much smaller it shouldnt be too hard to remedy, maybe with a simple filler? but i have no idea how to get a good finish on top of that... thats it for huge chunks out really, there is 1 more serious bit of damage, shown below. http://www.44norman.f2s.com/volume.gif this is the volume control, at some point before i got the guitar the knob must have been bashed pretty hard as it has cracked the coating all the way through. the only way of fixing this that i can see is rubbing down the coat completely and putting a new coat on, but i have no idea how to do that! http://www.44norman.f2s.com/edge.gif this is chips/cracks in the edging on the bottom curve of the guitar. completely recoating the guitar would seem to fix quite a few of the problems.. but i dunno. and the least taxing of the problems is this last one.. http://www.44norman.f2s.com/toggle.gif general scratches in the clearcoat, the ones around this toggle switch are the worst, but there are more all over the body, and small chips in the coat. well, thats my old guitar. i want it to look pretty good after the summer as it WILL be the 2nd guitar in my arsenal again as i love the playability of it almost as much as my £1200 ibanez! any help you can give to any of my problems would be awesome! and if you have links to guides that would be great too. i'd ideally like to keep the same grained finish as i quite like it, i'll also be refinishing the headstock with my own logo on it if there is anything to buy, it needs to be available to the UK as thats where i am. so stewmac is ok, as that ships to the uk, not sure about anywhere else. Thanks Matt