Orange Overload

 

After the two weeks was up, the lacquer was lightly rubbed down with wet'n'dry paper, rubbing compound and T-cut which gave a pretty good high-gloss finish. There's a few not-so-good areas but from any reasonable distance it looks great. The bright orange is so intense that the camera gets saturated. According to Kia-Ora, it's too orangey for crows, and apparently too orangey for Nikon's too!

 

 

 

The jack socket doubles up as a strap button. An extra hole was drilled to allow the E string bridge to be earthed. As the nut is aluminium, it should earth all of them in a roundabout way.

 

There are no plates over control cavities on this guitar as it would spoil the organic curves. The pickup selector switch is fitted underneath the pickup and accessible from the rear (the bagel!). No other controls are needed - it's very minimalist...

 

The pickup was then fitted to (a) pickup the string vibrations and (b) cover the dodgy woodwork and shoddy soldering.

 

Now for the artistic shots. Chewie got me some orange Neon strings for my birthday, so this was the time to whip'em out. They really are the icing on the cake! 

 

You can't beat a good angle shot...

 

Much better than straight photos...

 

The white strap matches the fretboard.

 

I'm getting the hang of not overloading the camera now. It's a case of standing further away and using the zoom lens. Simple really, s'pose.

 

 

Here it is, hanging together. It still hasn't snapped.

 

After a bit of settling in, the strings seem to stay in tune for at least a few hours. I'm pleased that the stainless steel re-inforcement has worked well as the strings can be tuned quite independently. I'm still getting used to the Delano Xtender pickup as I cannot decide on the best switch position. There is plenty of top end, but without sounding lacking anywhere else. It's a good place to start, and I'll have to give the 4x10 cab full beans with it soon ;-)

War paint

Painting is tedious.

Sanding is tedious.

Sanding down paintwork doesn't figure very highly in my list of favourite things to do, but it is a necessary step along the way. The water-causing-cracks-problem behind me, I took the opportunity to add a bagel-like shaped feature behind the pickup so that I can add a pickup switch. This three position switch will give humbucker-series / single-coil / humbucker-parallel. This tonal variation may prove very useful seeing as there will be no other controls.

I did a bit of reading up on t'internet and white undercoat is recommended for fluorescent paintwork. 

 

I then realised, after refinishing the body a second time, that the headstock is a different colour due to the white undercoat.

Painting is tedious.

The headstock was also re-finished to make it match. Both parts were then lacquered with a polyurethane based coationg that promised to be heavy duty and suitable for alloy wheels. It smelt just like a tin of wood varnish, but it does seem tougher than the original acrylic lacquer. Actually I was very pleased that the white undercoat did make a difference as the orange colour is now much brighter. Every cloud has an orange lining!

Another two week wait to allow the lacquer to harden and then it is ready to be flattened down again. This time I used the bare minimum of water with the 1200 grit paper, 2500 grit followed by rubbing compound and finally T-cut. It looked pretty good in most places, but I noticed a few areas where I had rubbed through the lacquer and it was flaking at the edges. D'Oh!

Painting is tedious.

I knew the flaking had to be dealt with before it started to spread everywhere, so the surface was roughened up slightly and a few more coats of PU lacquer were applied.

I now need to wait for another two weeks because "Painting is tedious".

Unless you're painting bagels...