Tarting up my body

lapua65

I have acquired a bashed and bruised Squier tele body that I want to spruce up but without carrying out a full strip (if I can). There are some relatively shallow scratches that I would hope I could polish out with medium cut car polish. I am assuming that with a poly finish there is no clear coat? There are tons of relatively small dings. None too deep.
So my questions are: How do you deal with dents on the finish? Will polishing quite aggressively deal with the shallow scratches?
 Can I paint over the existing finish in the same colour?
Any advice will be very much appreciated,

Corvus

Very fine scratches may polish out, anything else needs sanding or fill/sand. Paint could be just the one stage, and single-colour guitars often are. But can also be two stages with a thin basecoat and a clearcoat over it.
You can paint over the existing in any colour you like; clean it really well, lightly sand or scuff it first.

lapua65

Great. Thanks for that.. I was concerned that I had to take it back to bare wood. If I can fill the small dents and flatten the finish then paint that makes life easier.

munckee

I did one at the weekend. Sanded with 400 grit then filled and sanded again, then three coats of spray paint, 5 coats of clear.  When dried 400 light sand to remove the orange peel effect, then 1200 grit. 

I then used t cut then car polish. 

lapua65

What spray paint did you use?

munckee

I bought a paint called Montana from eBay.  I’ve done it before with a different make just whatever had the color I wanted. It was acrylic I think.