Painting time

And so the time has finally come to do some spraying. I'm a little uneasy as this is my first time with a real automotive spray gun. And I'll be using 2K urethane clearcoat - catalyzed two component paint. So any screw-ups will be hard to fix, but at least the paint should be durable and dry quickly (days as opposed to weeks). No test runs this time - it either works out or it doesn't. To make this even more fun I'm doing three guitars at the same time, as you can see in the picture below:

After shooting the first coat of clear I had the guitar looking like this:

Following this with a second coat after 30 minutes, the clear is flowing out quite nicely.

Time to lay her down to sleep. It turns out that I don't have the amount of paint to do many coats, but from what I know on cars they only do about 1.5, so if I manage to get three or four in total I should be fine... I think. I will probably not be sanding this since I'm anyway keeping the puzzle-like surface so... we'll see.

Gluing the pieces on

Time to start attaching the puzzle pieces to the body. I mixed some epoxy glue and started putting them one. Here goes the first round:

I managed to cram a line of them between the neck pocket and the neck pickup cavity, although I had to trim them a bit. I put a few more pieces on and left them pressed down for the night. In the morning I found the guitar looking like this:

After three or four such sessions I had all the pieces on the body.

As you can see I'm not trimming the pieces that are close to the edges. This is intentional. I want to maintain the puzzle "look" and keep the jagged edges.

At this point I'm done with the body for now - what remains to be done is covering it with clearcoat. This is going to be a bit complex, I need to find a spray gun and I'll probably be trying to use the facilities in the CERN Auto Club. But since I have other small projects going on in parallel, where I will also be clearcoating the bodies so I want to wait and do all of them at the same time. I anyway have quite some work to be done on the neck and fingerboard so I'll shift to that.

Testing the layout

This is an old Mayones guitar body that I'm refinishing for fun - trying to put some dyed flamed maple veneer on it. As you can see from the picture, that project is currently at the stage of having the old paint stripped from the wood. As the shape is close to what I'd like to have for the final CMS Guitar, I'm going to use it for a test shot:

I was thinking initially of a HH (humbucker-humbucker) pickup configuration, but I'm leaning towards a HS set up, with a single coil neck pickup (or maybe a mini-humbucker) to maximize the central photo area.
This will probably mean I'll have to find a HSS body and fill the middle pickup hole. The bridge will be a fixed one - I'll need all the sustain I can get given what I plan to do with the fretboard...