Hi fretboarders,
I’ve got a 90s US standard Tele, which I love to bits. It had a poly finish until a few years ago, when I stripped it (fairly inelegantly), stained it and gave it a couple of coats of Tru Oil. Since then I’ve toured it pretty heavily, and the wood has got its fair share of scrapes and bumps.
I’ve now decided to refinish it in nitro, so I’ve sanded off the Tru Oil and as much of the stain as I can ready for grain fill, primer and colour/clear. There are still quite a lot of knocks visible - which I kind of like since it’s a 20-year-old guitar - and I just wondered if refinishing it over a less than perfect body would look crap? Will the grain filler even it out anyway if I do it properly?
If anyone wants to chip in with their superior wisdom, that’d be much appreciated!
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Do your sealer and primer and then look at it carefully and fill any imperfections you can still see with the putty (most bodyshop type products work nicely over primer). I would then sand flat, prime again then flat that back as smooth as possible before the colour.
I use this stuff a lot - it's cheap and can be found easily but works really well:
https://www.halfords.com/motoring/paints-body-repair/fillers-preparation/holts-cataloy-knifing-putty-100g
In my personal experience - before doing this professionally too - it's worth doing the prep to start with because if after a month-long finishing process you end up with a result that doesn't thrill you, you'll want to start again (at least I used to) and it's painful to strip everything off and start over.
Just my take on it anyway!
www.rexterguitars.co.uk
www.rexterguitars.co.uk
if you want to relic and keep/recreate existing wear then you have some options for leaving it. But you need to have some experience of relicing to get that looking natural.
Its actually much easier to deal with the issues properly as said above
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(formerly miserneil)
peeling off the tape was a ball ache, it had been on longer than I usually leave for binding and left some sticky residue, but all sorted now.
anyone not sure what we are on aboue, I taped up the back of a guitar like this
to keep the wear it had in its last refin (edit: the red paint below is an old refin now removed, but it had worn nicely so the challenge was to keep the wear
That was done for the extreme wear Normally i do a lot less than that. I simply let the lacquer sink into the flaw and the use the obvious imperfection as a guide to recreate the damage afterwards
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The knocks on mine aren’t too crazy, so I’m just planning to get the surface as flat as I can before I start. Then once the grain’s filled and I’ve added the primer I should have a better idea whether or not to patch it up any further.
I don’t want to relic it, but equally I’m not too fussed about having a perfectly smooth finish either.
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Once the body is primed, I'd fill all the holes with Ronseal high performance wood filler sand smooth and prime again. Keep filling and priming (you'll probably miss bits on the first pass) until you have a perfectly smooth substrate. Then spray the white.
For a painting stick I have a length of 1" square-section tube drilled and tapped to take M4 machine screws. I appreciate this is overkill for a one-off job!