[:project guitar:]

Before starting on the lacquer I’ve taken some pictures of what the body looks like “so far” and with the neck placed on (not actually attached) to get more of an idea of what the overall thing will look like.
Here are some results:

I’m pretty pleased with the result so far, even with a lot of [...]

The white pickguard that came with the kit is OK but is just a generic white and it seems a pity to cover up about 1/3 of the area of the paint job (on the front) so I have decided on a transparent pickguard instead!
It’s from ebay and coming from the Netherlands to the UK [...]

Finally we’ve had some decent weather again and I’ve been able to finish the spray paint job on the body! After painting the darkest squares (previous post) and masking the horizontal stripes only to do half of the “medium” coloured squares – I removed the horizontal stripes, put the vertical ones back on, and did [...]

After 2 coats of paint (3 in parts) the silver colour on the body is finished and sanded smooth etc. Next step is to mask it off ready to do the design using the darker colour!

At the moment it looks like it will just be stripes, don’t worry though as it won’t end up as [...]

The neck in this kit is a standard maple neck with rosewood fretboard (probably the most common combination for ’standard’ guitars) and although I had given a bit of thought to the headstock design I hadn’t really considered doing it anything other than ‘natural’ colour with lacquer. I’m not really a big fan of the [...]

Having come up with the silver/grey/graphite/black/whatever design, we have tried this out on a piece of ‘junk’ wood taken from something else. The results are quite good and quite poor – quite good because I definitely can see how the colours fit together and that the spray paint method will work and that it is [...]

As mentioned a couple of posts ago, I’ve been using the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program – similar functionality to Photoshop, but free for GNU/Linux) and Inkscape to come up with some designs. Of course in the “olden days” before we had computers all this would have been done with sketches etc, for any sort [...]

By laying out the body and some of the parts (scratchplate, bridge) and photographing this I was able to get a quick image to import into the image editing programs GIMP and Inkscape (on Linux) in order to prototype some designs without having to draw them out manually every time. (Manual drawing is so last [...]