I have several projects lined up to work on over the next couple months. This guitar is a mid to late 1960's Hagstrom 2 that was given to me for free. What you see is what I got - neck and body only. No electronics or hardware, just a poorly executed amateur "refin". The guitar looks like it was sanded roughly with 40 grit paper (which also rounded off some of the body contours) and then sprayed rattle can black.
Under the black paint, you can see lots of wear and gouges in the original finish underneath. I started off using furniture stripper to remove the paint. I poured a small amount on the guitar and spread it around, let it sit for a couple minutes, then used plastic scrapers to remove the old paint. It was a slow process....
Most of the black paint came off, but the stripper didn't seem to work on the original red paint so I went to using my orbital sander. I have most of the body and neck sanded to 80 grit and most of the heavy scratchs and old paint are removed. I probably won't do much more with this guitar until I find some parts. Restoring the guitar to original condition probably will not happen since its extremely difficult to find Hagstrom parts, but off to Ebay to see if I can find some parts that will work on this guitar!