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!