Hey everybody, I have found useless help at other forums for refinishing and working on guitars. So I found this great forum full of genious luthiers. Hopefully i can get some help here (I have already enjoyed looking through old threads). I have looked through many tutorials and pretty much all were very undescriptive and all said different things and didnt even touch upon essential steps. They rarly even say what kind of sand paper to use, they just say sand. Anyways, down to business.
I got this nice Kramer Pacer from mid to late 80s from some friend of my friend. The kid new nothing about guitars and he found it in the garbage, a perfect Kramer. Anyways, the kid took it apart and just scraped the surface in one or two spots uselesslywith sand paper. He wanted to refinish it. So I had to refinish it because of what it was like at that point (all scraped up surface from a bit of sandpaper).I wouldnt have refinished it if it paint wasnt already destroyed. Anyways, I bought it off him for 20 bucks (should be worth 500 - 600 when I fix it up). So thats the story of how i got it.
Now for what I have already done to it. I have so far sanded most of it down. Still needs some work. I have discovered that it has a veneer. I dont really know much about that and hopefully you guys can from the pictures tell me whats going on with this guitar. I was told it is a maple veneer with an alder body. Newways, in these pictures you can see that where the cutouts are the wood is darker. I dont know why? Should I sand that down? What kinds of wood is it? Should I sand the veneer right off? Whats the advatages of doing that? I just need to know what to do with the sanding, what i should sand? and I need to knwo whats goign on with the wood. Its darker in the cututs for some reason?
Ok, now I have some questions about what to do next. I need to know what grit sand paper to get and for what stages? I dumbfully realized after i had already sanded down to wood that i didnt acctually need to go all the way to wood. Its to late now. So far I have done the sanding with 50 grit sandpaper. How many grit stages do i need before the next step. Would it be something like 50 grit, than 250 grit, than 600 grit, than 900, than 1600 wet sanding? I dont even know if you are supposed to wet sand a guitar before painting? Mybe it depends on the wood? yeah so what grit is the grit i need to sand it with before next step, which would be something like sanding filler, some coat or something, I have yet to figure that out. But, for now what grit is the last one before the next step? and do i need to wet sand?
Are there any other details about sanding I should know? Hopefully I can get help here as I work through it. Thanks, here are the pics.
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/5869/imgp1784ng2.jpg
http://img66.imageshack.us/img66/4619/imgp1787ot9.jpg
http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/4305/imgp1789xz6.jpg
http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/4279/imgp1790oc1.jpg
http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/2711/imgp1793yb4.jpg
http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/1361/imgp1794vn8.jpg
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/4001/imgp1777da8.jpg