Once the guitar is ready to be assembled together you must start “finishing”. This process turned out to be a much longer process than I initially thought it would be… Painfully so actually.
It all starts with a Z-Poxy coat to fill the pores of the wood. This is a 2 part mixture that you spread over the guitar’s back and sides NOT the top! This will help fill the deep pores of the wood. Laquer has a tendency to sink over time into the pores of the wood so filling them early with as many one or two coats of this Z-Poxy will ensure that you job later on is easier.
Some people use brush on finishes or water based finishes. I am just getting down and dirty with some good ol’ laquer, air compresser, and spray gun. If you are going to be laquering as well make sure you also have laquer thinner to clean out your spray gun after. Here are photos of all the equipment I am using for this process:
The first major lesson of laquering that I learned what to not spray while stuff is falling from the sky! I am not talking cats and dogs or Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. I am talking snowflakes! Here in the crazy Canadian winters snow flakes tend to fall often in the middle of the months of January. While I was spraying one day snow started to pour out of the sky and land onto my guitars leaving little imprints of snowflakes all over the guitar body. Now while this didn’t end up ruining the finish it just made sanding the laquer a lot more difficult and more time consuming than I wanted it to be.
Here are some pictures of a freshly laquered guitar! You can see my reflection in the finish:
Some things I noticed about the effects of laquer on the wood so far:
- The wood tightens up dampening the sound (expected and accounted for)
- The colour of the wood gets a LOT darker
Sanding laquer is an important stage. You will notice as you laquer your guitar that there will still be pores that will cause the laquer to sink. These will become obvious right away. After doing about 14 coats of laquer I left my guitar to sit for 2 weeks to let the finish sink as much as it can. I am now just at the end of the 2 weeks period and will have to start sanding the finish down so that it is perfectly flat. None of the pores should be showing at the end of the sanding process otherwise they will show on the finished product and this is NOT acceptable.
trueaxe
Chuck
