I've started painting both the Hagstrom and the old Kay in the past week. Both instruments are being finished with waterbased lacquer and will be black. I made up a little exhaust fan using a cheap Walmart box fan a furnace filter, some cardboard, and a flexible tube to exhaust out of my basement window. It works pretty good although for anyone reading this: I am using WATER-BASED lacquer which means there is no fire hazard. Can't do this with flammable lacquers otherwise you could run into some problems!
After touching up any fretboard damage, I installed new frets. I used a syringe to put a small amount of Titebond glue in each fret slot, then gently tapped the ends of the fret in before using the arbour press to fully seat the frets. The glue should fill in any gaps in the slots from the old fret tangs. Then I beveled the fret ends. I was extremely happy with how the frets turned out. I don't think there will be much leveling to have a perfect fret job. This guitar was certainly hacked up in the past, so I decided this guitar will never be restored to original condition (plus its next to impossible to find Hagstrom parts). And I don't know exactly what happened to this guitar its full of holes! The body had a small crack at the neck joint, 6 different strap button holes, 2 tooling holes, and 6 neck bolt holes!!! Not to mention all of the old pickguard and tailpiece holes! Lots of gluing and doweling took care all of that! The neck also had several screw holes..... Also to fit any modern tuners I had to plug and redrill the tuner holes. It took a while to gather up some parts, but I did find some suitable tuners, bridge, tailpiece, and I decided on a single Seymour Duncan tele pickup with a faux tortiseshell pickguard. I started the final sanding today so I should be spraying finish soon! |
Archives
July 2013
Categories |