Guitar Refreshing - Super Mario Style
For a change, this blogpost will be in english, since I will share it with people from the Internetz that may not be proficient in speaking German. Please don't grudge =)
Soooo, I bought this beautiful Squire Bulletstrat via Kleinanzeigen (Germany's Craigslist). While I kinda enjoyed that color, I wanted to completely rebuild and repaint it as a little diy project.
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| "Ist es nicht schön?" - "Ja! Es ist nicht schön!" |
This blogpost will give you an idea of the working process that it undertook, and what I learned on the way. But first: disassembling!
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| That was satisfying. |
The biggest challenge was also the first one. All the paint had to leave the body. I started by heating the paint and then chipping it with a knife in big chunks. That didn't work too well. I constantly cut into the wood and it took ages to complete the whole body.
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| Very first try. I knew than and there, that I had a lot of work before me. |
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| A thousand hours later... |
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| Finally finished! But the wood looked soooo bad. |
After several hours of chipping the paint, I sanded it. For hours. Sanding took easily half the time I worked on the project. Likely more. Once I was satisfied, I filled all holes and cuts in the body with special putty and sanded it once more.
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| Doesn't look like much, but we are getting there. |
The very smoth body was hung upside down in open air and got base coated in grey with a spray paint. Acrylic basis. Hanging it head down was a very good tip that I found online. It really helped to get a very smooth application done!
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| Looks better, doesn't it? |
After the second coat dried, I applied two times two layers of blue acrylic spray paint.
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| Hang in there, buddy. |
I decided to make a matching headstock. In the picture below you can see the headstock with gloss varnish (as well on acrylic basis. Stay in one system, folks!). All in all, I didn't have much trouble with applying the spray paint. Just make sure there isn't a lot of dust and avoid wind. Than you should be fine. Oh, and you do a lot of sanding between the layers.
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| Glossy! |
In the meantime I bought new electronics (e.g. Seymour duncan pickups), soldered it together an spray painted the pick guard. I messed up the soldering, so the neck pickup doesn't do anything. I have to fix that one day.
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| Copperfoil for shielding! |
And then I painted some stuff on the guitar.
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| Totally not staged! |
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| Look at me! All Instagramy and Filtery! |
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| Super Mario is saving his princess on my guitar! |
I needed to do some work on the neck. Filing the frets, polishing them with steel wool, sanding the back of the neck. Afterwards, I oiled the neck and fret board and mounted the new locking tuners and the nut.
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| Steel wool, dirt and fret metal on the table. |
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| Shiny! |
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| Some extra shielding for the electrics. |
Several weeks, two more layers of acrylic gloss varnish and and a lot of screwing, the new Super Mario Strat was finished!
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| I left the back open. I think it looks cool and allows for quick adjustment of the spring tension. Jimi did it, too, you know? |
That project was a lot of fun and a lot work. The next time I would definetely buy a machine that allows for easier and quicker sanding. My fingers ache just thinking of sanding paper.
Below you can see the Super Mario Strat in front of my Blackstar Amp. Thank you for reading this far. At the moment I'm working on the next guitar, so maybe you will see something similiar in the future!
Tschüssikovski.
