The Luthier Community

Joe.

Beautiful. What a great save!
I can't wait to hear it.
As always thanks for sharing!!!

_Mike

Thanks for all the good comments guys!

No new pictures for you today. I decided to finish this one with nitro. I bought a gallon of satin finish about a year ago as well as some sanding sealer and a couple of harbor freight guns, regular and touch-up size. So I've been reading and studying and between Arnt and Alan I've gathered up the courage to give it a shot.

I'm spraying outdoors under a shed roof off the shop and boy have I been learning!
First day using the sanding sealer I learned about orange peel. Then with my first coat of lacquer I got to learn about "blush". So studied the OLF for ways to fix that. I don't have any retarder, so wound up using minimal thinner, heated my pot of lacquer in the hot pot, 125 to 140, thanks Todd Stock, and shot a very wet coat, and that fixed that. So a few coats later I had the opportunity to learn about gas popping, where you get thousands of tiny bubbles freezing in the finish. Level sand, re-shoot with lower air pressure. And finally things are looking good, after a couple of shooting days I have a nice light build and I'm just going to lay down the final coat. Goes on nice and smooth, cleaning my gun, turn around, ..... and I get to learn about blush again! It had clouded up and started looking like rain, but I can work in this last coat, ha!

So it's a good thing I really like to learn new things! This spraying is just full of learning possibilities, again and again. Just like the rest of guitar building!

Having fun,
Joe

Hang in there Joe,

Nothing like learning something new.

Lefty

I spray Nitro in my garage Joe and have gone thru these things too. You really should
get some retarder for the blushing. I always add a cap full to each qt. and
haven't had any blushing since. And this is in Florida where the RH is around 100%
most of the time. I really enjoy spray finishing too! Good luck with it.
Are you planning on spraying the neck with nitro too ?

Yeah Lefty the old learning curve, especially when you're translating things you've only read about into hands on experience. But hey, sometimes all you can do is just back your ears and dive in!

Yeah Dave we've got high humidity back here in the woods in s.e. OK also. I'll get some retarder before I do the next one, good to hear that it really works! We've had a couple days of rain here since the last blush session and I'm not sure how long till the humidity drops. Anyway I got impatient to get on with it, fatal flaw I know, but since this is a vintage rebuild and I wanted a rubbed satin finish anyway here's what I did this evening.

I feel I've got a thick enough build on here so I hit it with 400 grit paper on a felt sanding block and that took off most of the blush. Then I rubbed it down with 0000 steel wool and am really pleased with the quality of the finish. Like seeing and touching fine wood as opposed to a plastic finish. Even hit the back with a couple of quick rubs with a soft cotton towel and you can see that it will buff up to a nice luster. Did just enough to see that it will polish, now I'll let it cure out a couple of weeks or more and then give it some hand buffing with a fine compound/Meguires ultimate I picked up today at Wallyworld.

So yeah, even with the learning curve, I'm liking the nitro.

Feeling my way along,
Joe

edit.... oh yeah, to answer your question Dave, yes I sprayed the neck also. The dovetail joint is solid on this one so I haven't felt the need to take it off. The fretboard isn't on yet, so I screwed a gate handle to the topside of the neck to hold it by.

Joe,

Ya think we could see a photo of the gate handle screwed to the neck?

That I would really like to see.

Lefty

Hey Joe!

Too bad that you were unable to find a perfectly 90° quartersawn top for this guitar. Yeah, it appears in places to be 90.0°, and other places it is 90.1°

I know a while back, I heard a few luthiers on the OLF complaining about too much medullary "silk" showing up in some tops. hahahahahha Some people just caint be pleased!

Sounds like you're just about ready to be able to teach a class on shooting nitrocellulose lacquer. You didn't mention gnats in the finish, so you have at least one lesson to go...

Lookin great!

Dennis

Okay Lefty, just for you, pics of a guitar you can really get a grip on!






And shot to show how the finish is looking.

And then a couple of shots of our tiger lilies with a visitor, enjoy.





And no Dennis, I've got lots more screwing up to do before I can teach anyone about spraying, I've only just begun to mess up with nitro!

Thanks guys,
Joe