I'm a Jigsaw - Or all about going to pieces in the box

Fabien de Frietas - Another dodgy finisher

Well, the OCD One started so well, but I don't mind admitting that I cocked it up. Nothing drastic, and no real harm done, but it wasted a bit of time and added a few more days to the 'Expected delivery date', which isn't good.

What did I do?

Well, the lovely finish we're going with involves a cream coloured cloth with a rather wicked design on it. This, I think will look the canine's cojones when it is done, but I didn't think about the fact that the guitar body I'm using (a lovely, lightweight Alder one, if you are wondering) had previously been finished in black.

Don't get me wrong, I've used black bodies before (and red, blue, purple, white, silver and well, lots of colours now) and never had a problem, and maybe it is because the fabric is a little thinner or that the cream is just that bit more tender, but the bottom line was that you could see the black thru the cloth, which kinda killed the effect somewhat.

Worse still, where I'd applied the adhesive with a brush you could see brush marks through it too.

In summary, nightmare.

Anyway, that was a little too Jooky, even for me, and so I've stripped the guitar back, given it a good smoothing too, and done what I should have done in the first place which was to give it a nice white undercoat. Something that will pay dividends later on...methinks.

So there we are, confession over.

While I've been waiting for the paint to dry, it has given me the chance to get on with some other OCD bits, and I thought the neck was as good a place to get going as any. As I mentioned before the wood is really nice and as it happens there wasn't much to do other than to put the Schaller tuners on and add the logo. I did, give it a light sand and a couple of coats of very thin nitro - investment for the future kind of thing. It was a practically unfinished neck so it needed a touch of something and oil didn't seem to fit with this one.

Other than that I've started to prepare the finishes for the two scratchplates. The one the guitar will 'ship' with (the HSS Filtron and lippie pickups) is having a black version of the cloth, to give a nice contrast. I was a little worried that it would look too busy, but as it happens it doesn't, and I'm pretty chuffed with that.

The second one, which is the three single coils, is going to be cream to match the body, and again it was nice to see how that worked out as it retained the cream look and gives a nice indicator for the body, of course.

Surprisingly, I even remembered to use the right colour pickguards (I had one white and one black...soooo...)

So, basically we're getting closer now. Once the pickguards are finished I'll wire them up, and I can be getting on with the body finish after a bit of flattening of the undercoat.

In more of an upbeat summary, can't be bad...