My Jazzmaster Project.

[HNB]

Looking really nice!

[Nox_Vagari]

Looking really nice!

Thank you!

Not to derail my own thread... but Jesus! I've just seen pictures of your Art Jazzblaster V2.0

!! That thing is just too cool, love it.

[wproffitt]

TWO can play at the gold guard on black finish suggestion game!
This is my black JM:

[HNB]

Thank you!

Not to derail my own thread... but Jesus! I've just seen pictures of your Art Jazzblaster V2.0

!! That thing is just too cool, love it.

I appreciate it!

[Nox_Vagari]

TWO can play at the gold guard on black finish suggestion game!
This is my black JM:

Oh, I think I've seen your Jazzmaster before somewhere. It really does look great!

[Nox_Vagari]

So, the weekend is here again.

A little disaster happened though.

So I painted another coat of colour on the headstock. And well...



=/

I suspected moisture, and it has been pretty humid here. But this was really bad. Anyway I eventually found the issue:


The damn air compressor had like half a litre of water in it! How it got there I don't know, because I specifically remember opening the drain valve before spraying last week and nothing came out. Does it really accumulate water that fast? Anyway.

So left the compressor, air hose gun and paint tins in the garage with a dehumidifier running all night. And in the morning the sun came out so put everything out into the sun.

Meanwhile. I sanded the headstock back to a workable level:


Hey look, I actually have real masking tape now. Things can only improve from here, right!?

[wproffitt]

Thanks for the kind words. I was pretty surprised at what some pickup covers, knobs, and a Pickguard would do for how I felt about this guitar’s looks. Have fun with making all of these decisions with your project! Any progress?

[Nox_Vagari]

Thanks for the kind words. I was pretty surprised at what some pickup covers, knobs, and a Pickguard would do for how I felt about this guitar’s looks. Have fun with making all of these decisions with your project! Any progress?

Yup, just above your post. I beat you to it hah.

[wproffitt]

Thanks! Looking great!

[Nox_Vagari]

Thanks! Looking great!

Thanks!

Another small update.

I bought a cheap little water trap for the compressor. I thought it'd be better than nothing.


Then I sprayed the headstock, looks good again.


I sanded the final coat of colour with 320grit before starting the clear coats.


First coat of clear:

[Chat Noir]

Very beautiful work!

[Nox_Vagari]

Very beautiful work!

Hah, thank you =)

[Nox_Vagari]

So last time I ended with a picture of the first clear coat.

Since then I've been having a really difficult time with my equipment. I left the compressor and air hose to dry (with all valves open) for about a week, cleaned out my gun and left the water trap to dry as well.

But still.. I can only do about a single coat before the air from the compressor gets super moist and ruins the lacquer with that cloudy haze.

Not that it's managed to stop me or anything though. I just sprayed two more coats (with difficulty), and I'm done. So three coats of clear all together.

After this I sanded with 600 grit to get rid of orange peal. followed by 800 and 1000. Here's what it looked like after 1000 grit:


Seems like everyone keeps mentioning "be careful not to sand through the clear coat!", but to be honest I think it's not something to be too worried about. Even when I was sanding my first very light coats of colour I noticed that it took quite a bit of sanding to get through even with 320 grit. Maybe I got lucky somehow?

Now to the polishing! I used something called "Extreme cut", haha. This is because I was too lazy to go all the way up to 2000 grit. Actually I don't think I did a great job even with 1000 grit, but it'll still be fine.


After a few passes here it is, still needs quite a bit of work though as can be seen:




The hazy spots are cloud reflections btw.



Here's where I'm a bit undecided though; as I mentioned previously I don't want to do a relic job. BUT... I may not be opposed to just some lacquer checking (temperature related) on it's own. Not sure right now, but we will see. Yeah, so I'm opposed to relicing... but I'm not...

[Nox_Vagari]

More polishing:






These arrived in the mail:

[kdanie]

What is the humidity of your air (not compressor)?? Anything over 50% the paint might suck it out of the atmosphere.

ken