MIMF

At this stage the neck was pretty much finished, just the frets needed to be levelled, crowned and dressed. So I installed the neck with tuners to the body, installed the trem and strung the guitar to check what I'd have to to do before the paint job. The first job was to check the fretboard for fret buzz. So picked each string at every fret to find the frets that needed to be filed down.

The paint job is always the most tedious part of every build, but it pays off in the end. Sometimes I end up sanding off the paint and starting all over again, as I did this time too. I had sprayed two layers of white primer and topped it with silver paint, 1 tbsp of silver powder in 250 millilitres of clearcoat diluted with thinner 1:1. My intention was to achieve an bright yellow candy finish. The result was not what I was looking for. Bright yellow transparent tint looked green on top of the blueish silver and adding red tint to the mixture turned it brownish orange. The silver undercoat worked fine with red, blue and green tints, but yellow was going to need a neutral white background and a different powder to add the sparkle I wanted.

I laid the project aside for a while to find a solution to the paint problem - and eventually I found one. I repainted the body and the face of the headstock with white primer and topped it with my new mixture: 1 tbsp of pearlescent powder, 1 tbsp of reflective glass powder (commonly used in traffic signs) and 300 ml of clear lacquer diluted with thinner in a 1:1 ratio. I sprayed the mixture with a lower tank spray gun set at a 6 bar pressure. I kept the spray gun in a constant whirling motion to prevent the heavy glass powder from setting at the bottom of the tank.

I found the right stuff on AliExpress, the powders cost about 8€ for 250 grams each and they arrived in a few weeks with free delivery. The result was just what I had chased all along. When sprayed with a transparent yellow tint the powder combination gave a radiant glow that got enhanced by every coat of clear lacquer I added.
After the yellow tint I sprayed a coat of 2-component acrylic lacquer and let it cure before gluing a black 6 mm binding to the body front edge. I was a bit nervous about the lacquer, as it was a new acquaintance to me. My favourite lacquer, Troton Scratch Resistant in no longer available and the importer recommended another Polish product Profix CP 2016 VHS 2K to replace it with. The new stuff is not quite as hard as the old one, but it's easier to sand and with a good buffing it gives a really nice mirror-like high gloss surface. Once I got the air pressure and the spray gun settings right, Profix was easy to spray and didn't run easily. It cures in 10 hrs, but before final sanding I let it cure for 24 hrs. So far I haven't found it prone to scratches, so I think we're going to get along just fine.

I glued the black ABS plastic binding to the body with CA glue and secured it with masking tape. Around the body horns I heated the binding with a hot air pistol to soften the plastic and not break it when bending it.

The next steps were spraying layer after layer of clearcoat and wet sanding with soap water and 400, 800 & 1200 grit papers between coats. I sprayed no less than 7 coats of clear lacquer and sanded in between.

After the final coat of clear lacquer I sanded the project one last time - with 800, 1200, 1500, 2000 & 2500 grit papers.
Time to shine! I polished the smooth sanded lacquer with Farécla G3 and G10 compounds, a buffing sponge and an air-driven random orbital sander. I polished twice with G3 medium coarse paste and twice with G10 fine liquid, wiping off paste residue with a micro fibre cloth as I went on.

With all the parts polished I could begin reassembling the guitar, starting with installing the tuners.

I shielded the pickup cavity and the control cavity carefully with conductive copper tape. With the shielding connected to the grounds there is, to my delight, very little hum.

Th-that's all, folks! I hope you'll enjoy this thread.