Preface: This is my eighth guitar refinish. For my first two I followed all the proper rules and etiquette for guitar refinishing and they turned out pretty nice. For the next five, I broke pretty much every rule, (and some new ground too) for interesting results. At this point I'm like a lot of you reading this... I have too many guitars, and certainly don't need another. At this point they are simply hobby projects and experiments, quite often in project recovery.
That said, I've been working in the background on getting the tummy carve sealed on the tele, about eight coats of tinted shellac, to get it to match the rest of the body, then sanded flat. In my mind's eye, I've been thinking of an semi-transparent finish for the back and sides of Paisley Royale, sort of a mary kay kind of thing but not in white, but in a dark magenta, but with some strong dark grain showing through. But this body isn't ash, I think it's alder and didn't have much for grain. So I opted to see if I could fake it.
LOL! Right? the worst looking chunk of zebrawood ever in the history of the world. This was dye, with a brush. I forged ahead anyway. with a base coat dye of some eye mixed dark magenta / maroony dye. Well, I didn't expect this next stage to pretty much erase all my brutal grain lines, but that's what happened, and not a tear was shed. I should have known a seal coat would have helped, but things happen for a reason sometimes.
not bad, the colour is kind of right, but this is simply a basecoat for a semi-trans coming later. I'll probably try to dye on some grain lines on again. That might be the ticket, a smaller brush, lighter hand. I'll do it better this time now I have some experience.
Now that had this pinky-red dye mixed up, I decided to carry it through on to the top a bit.
This was the first pass, with a heavier loaded rag, moving slightly inward. Went a bit deep in the upper curve. So I kept working with it and smoothed it out significantly.
Couple more pics, did the headstock lightly too. The burst is subtle, maybe too subtle... but that's the best kind, right?
So I'm going to let this dye set. and think about doing better on the grain for next time.
So the plan is paint some new grain lines, fix two places where a couple of the crystals came off via all the recent handling, though I have to say I am abundantly pleased with how well they are sticking, generally. A few coats of opaque pinky tinted shellac then clearcoat the back and sides.
Not really sure what I'm going to do with the front yet, but I have a LOT of this UV stuff, I think I might just pour it on and sort of "squeegie" it in-between all the cracks, sort of like grain filler, then hit it with the UV hard (wait for a supper sunny day) to lock everything down for good. I'm not looking for a mirror smooth top, lots of other guitars have that. This doesn't feel "grindy" on the hand at all, probably because the crystals are so small.
. Love the blues of that Addict guitar, too!
