The Final Step in Painting.

Obviously, I did not update the blog last week. I was unfortunately busy and didn't have time to put on the additional coats of lacquer that I wanted to. Putting on lacquer is a time consuming process because of setup and clean-up. On top of that, I have to wait two hours between coats to properly give it time to dry. But lucky me, I was able to make up the lost time with a 3-day weekend! Thanks, Labor day!

So, on Saturday, I setup the garage like before and sprayed the guitar a second time for that additional coat of lacquer. After two spraying sessions, I decided that I wasn't making any significant improvement by adding more lacquer with the spray-gun. The trouble was is that the spray-gun was spraying a very 'coarse' coat. The lacquer was going on smooth, but not completely smooth as what would be ideal. After giving sanding a try, I realized I was rubbing off the thin coat of lacquer in areas when I wasn't careful, and it still wasn't enough to make it smooth. Clearly the spray-gun wasn't working out, so I had to think of some other way to apply the lacquer smoothly. I decided to call it a day and sleep on it.

The next day, I woke up with the brilliant idea of putting on some lacquer using a paintbrush that I had purchased a long time ago (remember when I was going to do the rose?) Using a paint brush, I coated an area around the electronics cavity as a testing area to see if my idea had any merit. I checked back two hours later and amazingly, my genius plan.... didn't work. If anything, it still had that 'coarse' texture in the test area, only now it was thicker.

I sat there next to my incomplete guitar wondering what I could do to possibly to smooth out the body. As my gaze wandered around the body though, I realized that the 'coarse' texture was actually very consistent across the body of the guitar. I decided that using the spray-gun was the original genius plan and that this was the design I was going for from the very beginning. So, reasonably satisfied with how the guitar looked, I concluded that it was ready to be assembled.