Grand Angus Project, Part 7: Finishing up

This is going to be a long one, sorry, I'm going to include everything from final sanding up to the finished product.

So, where were we...? Right, we were waiting for the lacquer to cure! And wait we did, for 3 weeks while the lacquer cured. Whilst I'm not 100% convinced the full 3 weeks were necessary (advice online for this type of lacquer is a bit inconsistent), I decided to play it safe.

I whipped out the 1200 grit wet and dry, got myself a bowl of water, added a drop of detergent, and wrapped it 'round a sanding block. I went and got a sort of form flexible sanding block for this, because I didn't think the water would be good for my cork one.

I was pleasantly surprised by how easily the surface of the guitar sanded smooth! When I was trying it before with coarser paper it was taking a whole lot longer to flatten out, but now it was a breeze. Comparatively. The pic on the right shows the back of the guitar, most of it smooth sanded (the lighter, duller bits) and the top part still to be sanded (the darker, shiny bits).

It took a couple of days, on and off, before the whole thing was smooth, but it was still faster than I thought it would be. Once it was done, it was time to crack out the buffer pads!

I had never used these pads before, and suffice it to say I was a little apprehensive. These things can ruin a finish if not used carefully. The pads can get very hot, and they can burn right through the lacquer.

Still, I'm brave, and I was going to give it a crack! The plan was thus: polish once each with medium polish, fine polish, and swirl remover. It was a little unfortunate that I only had 2 sets of pads, so I would do the swirl remover by hand with a cloth.

So with the plan in mind I lathered up the first pad with medium polish and began buffing. Holy shit. It was VERY tricky. I didn't really have the equipment to clamp the guitar, and it would make it hard to buff with a clamp on the body, so it was loose. But if the buffing pad grabbed on to the surface of the guitar it tried to throw it across the room. Getting the pressure right was crucial, and it took a bit of practice to get there. Then....

You should have heard the swearing. It was loud. It was profane. And it didn't even begin to sum up my anger and frustration. That's burn through, right down to bare wood. Through the clear, and through the colour. I was absolutely gutted.

I spent about 3 days after that incident wondering what the hell to do. I had a few options:

1. Try and colour match the red, touch up the hole, re-lacquer. Likelihood of success: Slim-to-nil.
2. Strip the whole guitar back to wood and start the finish again. Time to complete: 2-3 months.
3. Say "fuck it", chalk it up to experience, and keep going.

I went with option 3. I'm not planning on doing anything with this guitar, and perfection was never going to be achieved, so I decided I could live with the blemish. I sanded the melted clear back to smooth.

I was pretty intimidated at this stage to pick the buffing pads back up. What if I just made things worse? I figured the best thing to do would be to pick them back up and try again quickly, or I might be too scared to ever try again.

I think the picture on the right was after finishing buffing with the medium polish. The medium stuff is supposed to get out the tiny scratches left from the final sanding. The fine stuff gets rid of the scratches from the medium polish, and the swirl remover gets it all nice and shiny!

I got through the medium and fine polishes without anymore mishaps! Who rules? Simon rules!

I was then left to do the swirl remover by hand. That was fine, except that by hand I didn't get anywhere near as good results as I did with the buffing pads with the other compounds. That was a shame, because the swirl remover is what gets it REALLY shiny, but I didn't have any clean pads. Before my next build I'll have to buy another set of StewMac buffing pads.

To the left, the first time the fretboard has been clean of tape for a long long time. It's not actually good to leave tape on as long as I did, but it came off fairly smoothly.

I found an issue at this point, though. The joint where the tape met the lacquer on the back of the neck left a fairly sharp edge. Wasn't sure how to fix this, so I tried attacking a small bit on the underside of the fingerboard up near the headstock with some sandpaper. It didn't really work, but I wasn't particularly vigorous. Still haven't sorted that bit out!

With that done, that finish was complete. The finish represented that vast majority of work for the project, so I was pretty keen to knock the rest of it off that night. In hindsight, it may have been beneficial to take it a little slower, but I was excited, dammit!!

I wired up the guitar. That probably took the longest of the remainder of the tasks. Including stripping wire, soldering etc., I probably spent 2-3 hours getting that sorted. I wired everything as per the wiring diagram from the first post. It was evident during this process just how cheap all the components were! If I do another one of these, I'll definitely be upgrading the pots and pickups. Probably the switch too.

Next came the bridge. I had to scrape out the lacquer buildup from within the holes for the bridge/tail piece legs, and then the sleeves fit in beautifully. I was really impressed with how well these pieces fit. It only took a few minutes to screw the bridge and tailpiece in to place.

With that done, all that was left was tuners, pick guard, and strings. A quick adjustment of the truss rod to straighten the neck, and she was ready to be plugged in!

And how did it sound??? Terrible :-)

Thanks for following.