Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Olympic White Strat Body Relic

I have been working on this for a while now - a Customer sent his Tobacco Sunburst Strat in for a re-spray and relic job. I have photographed much of the process (I have left out a few "trade secrets"..)
The guitar started life as a standard Strat with the really thick modern polyester finish:


Stripping off this finish takes elbow grease and a heat gun. I have tried all available paint strippers (even aircraft stripper) with no luck - I find the only way to remove this modern finish is with a good quality heat gun, taking your time not to scorch the wood:



Looks really rough right now but only the top coats have been removed - Fender seals the wood with a wickedly hard product as shown below:


Lots of hand sanding will get you back to bare wood, ready for a bit of Vintage Fender body shaping and some grain filling:



After a final sand to remove excess grain filler it's time for a coat of primer (hand flatting as needed):


Several coats of Olympic White Nitrocellulose are applied (hand flatting between every other coat):


Body now painted (sorry about the poor quality picture):


At this point I relic the body in accordance with the Customers instructions - I would call this one medium / heavy - The basic relicing has been roughed in, along with the aged hardware:


More work is done to smooth out some of the wear - then its time for my light box to blast the nitrocellulose with some UVB-313 light for 17 hours:


This gives a nice aged yellow finish to nitrocellulose - the finish checking applied earlier is also enhanced by this process:


To give us the final reliced Olympic White Stratocaster Body:


Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Sky Art's Guitar Star Show in Cardiff

I am going to be at Sky Art's Guitar Star show in Cardiff on Thursday 9th April - it's being held at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Castle Grounds, Cathays Park, Cardiff, CF10 3ER.

http://www.sky.com/tv/show/guitar

I am obviously not entering (for all who have heard me play will understand!) but I will be there with a few guitars from my collection on view for the production. There are two sessions - 1.00PM and 4.00PM - should be a great day out and lets hope to see some local talent (Dude! NO STAIRWAY!)