Superfreaky Part IIIa ~ Luthiery Laboratories

July 15, 2020

Superfreaky Part IIIa

July 15, 2020

Laying out the parts to see what it will look like. The body has been finished for a long time. Yesterday I encased the neck in plastic - 4 layers of polyurethane, wet-on-wet. Today I smoothed it out with 320 sandpaper, a gentle touch to remove any remaining wood grain and give a good surface for the final topcoat. It will need a few days to fully cure before then.

I'm using Krylon satin poly. It goes on very nice, and you can get it pretty cheap at Hobby Lobby with their ever-present coupon. It also seems to be less yellow than Minwax or the other one. This Ric is coming together nicely. I've started to pull together parts for another.

Update:

The final coat of poly is on the neck and looks great. I'll give it a week to cure hard before I start installing hardware. I also want to re-polish the fretboard.

Uncategorized, 07/15/20

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Rickenbacker 4001 Bass 1

This one is kind of a joke and an experiment in just how cheap you can build a guitar. The body is dry-erase board over plywood - no finish - with Tolex side binding. Dry-erase board is Masonite covered with Melamine. The neck is 100% Radiata pine, even the fretboard. The "inlays" are glitter and CA glue. The pickguard is the other side of the dry-erase board - 'chalkboard'. The pickup mount is a 57 cent switch plate.

More: Rickenbacker 4001 Bass 1 ...

Finishing

Black Polyurethane body. This is during the polishing process, you can see it is not even clean. The front came out like black glass. I smoothed the orange-peel with 1500 grit wet, then 2000 and 3000. Then I switched to the random orbital with a red sponge cutting pad and Turtle Wax rubbing compound that claims to remove 1200 scratches. Shouldn't be any 1200 scratches, since I started with 1500. That came out shiny, but with swirl marks in the light. Then I switched to another red cutting pad with Meguiar's Ultimate Compound, and finally a softer yellow pad with the same Meguiar's. At that point, it was pretty much a factory finish. I didn't work as hard on the back, it is nice, but will soon enough encounter a zipper or belt buckle, so the effort would be wasted.

More: Finishing ...