It's shiny!

This last week has been one of the most stressful of the year, and I'm quite relieved that it's over, although next week will be no cakewalk either. Here's a brief rundown of what I've been up to:

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent sanding the acoustic and preparing for finishing, Thursday I sprayed a sealer coat, did some touchup, and applied grain filler.

Yesterday I put a couple final touches on the electric so it is now ready to be sanded for finishing. These include rounding over the body, sanding epoxy off the fretboard inlays, fine tuning the radius of the fingerboard, and installing frets.

Last night, I was up until about 2 am sanding the grain filler off of the acoustic so I could start spraying lacquer on today. I didn't quite finishing the grain fill sanding last night, so I spent a couple of hours this morning finishing that chore. Once that was done, I had to record some top thicknesses and sprayed a sealer coat before lunch. After lunch, I got 4 coats of lacquer sprayed and even got in some good work on my archtop neck as well as gluing the archtop back to the ribs. I may have it done for the advanced finishing class that I'm taking in the last 2 weeks of May so I can put a pretty sunburst on it! I'm stoked about everything.

Below are some photos of how the acoustic is sprayed.

First, I spray the front, back and edges of the headstock:
...then I spray the sides:...then the back and top:
...and then another coat on the sides since they are harder to spray and the finish doesn't seem to build up on them as easily:...and lastly I hang up the guitar and spray the neck:

Oops, I sprayed a little too heavily on the headcap and developed some runs. It's alright though because this will be leveled out later:

And a few shots of the nice, wet, shiny guitar hanging in the booth to dry:
This is the current progress on the archtop:
I just need to get those blasted braces fit to the inside of the top, and the box will be together and ready for routing the binding channel.

Here are a couple of shots of the electric progress:I think the diamonds turned out quite nicely and look awesome with the gold fretwire. Unfortunately I'm not sure where my camera battery charger is, so I used Alex's camera to take these, so I apologize for them being out of focus.
This guitar looks better in person. I just have a couple of burn marks from routing the roundover in the body that need to be sanded out, as well as finishing the roundover taper on the back and arm contour transitions. This thing will be done soon!

Umm... diamonds and sanity.

Tell me people am I going insane???

Well I guess I'm not, but I sure as heck am stressed out. After a couple of days of sanding, the acoustic is finally ready to start being sprayed! I was hoping to get the sealer coat on today so I could grain fill the first thing tomorrow morning, but that didn't happen. The good news is that there's no more sanding! This leaves me with the following needing to get done at the specified times: Spray sealer and apply grain filler tomorrow, sand grain filler friday night and maybe saturday morning, spray another sealer coat and 4 gloss lacquer coats on Saturday, Spray 4 more lacquer coats on Monday, level sand lacquer and spray 4 more coats on Tuesday, spray 4 more coats Wednesday and glue bridge on near the end of the day, and lastly make nut and saddle on Thursday by 3. I can do it. Fun stuff. Lots of stress.

Considering there was nothing to do on the acoustic tonight, I decided to get some work done on the notacaster. After much deliberation, I decided that I was going to do diamonds on the entire fretboard so things would look uniform and not as if I screwed up, so tonights order of business was to cut out more gold mother-of-pearl diamonds and inlay them into the fingerboard. I used a jeweler's saw and a handy dandy inlay cutting jig I made to cut out the pearl. Then I located on the fingerboard where they would be placed and traced the outline of each diamond. With the outlines drawn, I used the dremel tool with a precision router base to route out the fingerboard. Then, it was just a matter of mixing up some dark mission brown with epoxy, and epoxying the diamonds in place. I'll have to sand all the excess epoxy off on Friday to see how everything turned out, but I'm pretty sure that the diamonds will look awesome!

Here is the fingerboard after having the cavities for the diamonds routed out. You can also see all the diamonds that I cut out behind it, as well as the precision router base with the dremel in the upper left hand corner:

And after epoxying the diamonds in:The fingerboard looks really messy now, but it's a good idea to really pack the epoxy in so there will be no gaps.

And here is a shot of the body with the control cavity cover that I made by laminating 3 thin pieces of the top wood:It's not a perfect grain match because that would be impossible considering the pieces were cut from a different plane of the wood, but it's pretty close and I think it turned out really well.

That's all I have for tonight, but I'll try to post pictures of the acoustic finishing process and archtop tomorrow or Friday.