Guitar Project Part 4: Finishing

No, it didn't take me six months to finish the guitar--it just felt like it (and I've only now gotten around to posting the pictures). Not bad looking, eh? And you should hear how it sounds! All in all, this was a fantastic experience, and the finished guitar came out better than I dared imagine.

This is my final post about the build process. You can read Parts 1, 2, and 3 here, here, and here.

After installing the hardware for the first time, I stripped everything and sanded down to about 400 grit. After masking around the mahogany and raising the grain with water, I rubbed a few coats of red stain into the wood. Next came the maple, with a lighter amber color.

Having come so far with the build, I was terrified of messing something up at this point. Mixing and applying the stain was a trial and error process, with plenty of error and panicked cover-ups. Lowlights included spilling a jug of stain all over the back of the guitar. My dad was incredibly valuable for his advice and moral support during the finishing process.

Next came grain filler, which is a requirement for a gloss finish with open-grained woods like mahogany. The first attempt of applying this was a complete disaster. The water-based grain filler made the water-based dye run and collect into a bloody tie-dye effect that hadn't appeared in my test pieces. Fortunately, no pictures exist of my precious guitar in this state. The only solution was to sand the body down to beneath the stain, re-stain, apply some shellac (to seal the stain), grain-fill again, and touch up the dye with a Q-tip. Needless to say, I was not happy about having to do this.

But it was paying off. The color was great!

All that was left was the clear coat. To make things easy (well, easier...) we used cans of aerosol laquer. To ensure that everything got coated evenly, we set up a makeshift poorly-ventilated paint room in the garage. We hung the guitar through its pegholes with a bent coat-hanger contraption:

Of course, leaving the guitar unattended to dry for hours, suspended by a coat-hanger (in the winter!) made me nervous. But everything came out OK. Four or so coats later, I was ready to sand.

My recollection of the sanding process is quite blurry, since it occurred in a single painful six-hour chunk. I wet-sanded the whole guitar down to 1500 grit and then used a polishing compound. Soon after, I cleaned up the frets, installed the hardware, and strung it up! Here are the pretty pictures:

I've been happily rocking out on the new axe for the better part of 6 months now. There have been no problems so far. There are a couple of minor dings and scratches, but those give it character :)

Onto the next endeavor! A semi-hollow body? An electric bass? Stay tuned...