The guitar project is proceeding in the background. I've a few days at home this week, before I travel to Liverpool for work on Thursday.
It's quite useful because I'm at the spray painting stage. This appears to require frequent sessions spraying very thin coats, first of primer and now I'm moving on to the Ford Focus GT Pearlescent Orange middle layers.
The face mask seems even more important because I can see all the tiny aluminium particles used to make the pearlescence as they float in the air.
I've also got a whole selection of 600, 800, 1200 and 2000 wet and dry silicon carbide paper for the intermediate sanding and something called a tack cloth to wipe down the prepared surface. That's a whole new learning curve for me.
The timber for the body is alder, which is relatively inexpensive but quite stable.
It is more suitable for painting in a block colour, rather than staining to bring out the not very interesting wood grain.
I see that fancy guitars get made of harder woods and they can have very attractive patterning. I suspect that is why they get stained to show the natural wood grains. I'm realistic enough to know that I'd just ruin anything too fancy.
They say that the wood affects the guitar tone too. I understand the basic physics, such that no-one makes electric guitars from hard rubber or plastic, but I also wonder about the whole maple vs mahogany vs walnut discussion. I'm sure the guitar's own resonance must make some difference, but I can't help thinking that on an electric guitar the signal chain of pickups, tone controls and amplifiers will be the more dramatic factor. Maybe someone should run some blind tests of different guitars.
Anyway, I see lots of Fender guitars are made from alder, so it can't be too bad.
I've also started to] marshal some switches for the various controls. I decided to make a cardboard template and screw the controls to it. Even with just two pickups there's a surprisingly large variety of wiring options.
(Building a guitar? See also parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
2 comments:
It's really coming along...What a major project you have taken on, but so satisfying, too, I would think...
Naomi It's quite interesting because there are large self-imposed gaps in it as a project.
The wood preparation and spraying seems to consist of about ten minutes of activity followed by a multi-hour gap whilst things dry. Then another busy ten minutes!
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