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Got finished repainting this NR Firebird, stripped the nasty polyester and repainted in nitro in a much lighter burst and made the headstock sorta like the Bill Frisell Jag look.

SCHWINNNNNNNG!

repoman wrote:
Got finished repainting this NR Firebird, stripped the nasty polyester and repainted in nitro in a much lighter burst and made the headstock sorta like the Bill Frisell Jag look.

That's pretty wicked man. Love NR 'birds.

that's super clean, nice job on the refinish,

how do those pickups sound?

Thanks
FYI If you want some lacquer that checks really well the Watco stuff from Home Depot checks even without heat applied, just a duster can (I always had trouble finding a lacquer that would check)
(I know a lot of ppl hate lelics but I'm a sucker for em for some reason)

Pickups sound really really good, they are from some small builder I never heard of (Great Lakes Pickups) and these pair were on Reverb for 80 bucks used so I took a chance on them. The guitar came with some Burny P90s which were very meh.





It took about 11 hours of this to get down to the wood, Japanese guitars are always coated in this insane polyester shit that's impervious to heat and chemical stripping. It's always so thick the control cavity covers always stick up about 2-3mm when it's painted in the lacquer from difference in thickness of the finish:

Nice. Yeah, stripping that finish is a bitch and a half. I tried chemicals once and it was a horrible mess with little effect. Heat gun and scraper for life.

the checking on that is awesome!
I stripped a teisco once and it took several years off my life

you end up doing most of it with sanding?

hbombgraphics wrote:the checking on that is awesome!
I stripped a teisco once and it took several years off my life

you end up doing most of it with sanding?

Yes, mostly an orbital and detail sander with like 40-80 grit and it still took that long.



Heres another Japanese guitar that I stripped with the same nuclear war proof shit on it that I basically ruined when trying to repaint it...the heat gun only took off the polyurethane goldtop finish but beneath was that chemically cured polyester shit, this one was a huge hassle because the chemical stripper demolished the binding and I had to learn how to rout and bind and refret it...this one is kind of a mess and has a really weird top, it's so splotchy, some of that is the grain some is from uneven spraying and sanding...hopefully it won't look too retarded when done. I repainted this one at least 10 times trying to get the red wine finish and I'm just sick of dealing with it, it has some weird ass contours from over exuberant sanding in some areas.

Update on my Japanese guitar - no paint stripping for me though

It was found in a skip and is a bit tatty, so I decided to use it to mess around with

Until yesterday it had a single P90 with the neck pickup hole covered in electrical tape, now it has two v cheap chinese-made mini humbuckers too.

I had a three way toggle lying around and didn't want the effort of drilling, cutting etc. to fit a 5 way, so the neck and bridge pickups are on the 3 way with the middle pickup on an on/off switch. I can't have the middle pickup on on its own, but I can have all three on at once.



I've not had much time to play it yet as my left ear is playing up, but it sounds good in my right ear

NICE

are the chinese mini buckers an ebay purchase?

was no middle only option a choice or a circumstance of the switches you had available?

Speaking of which.. I don't remember if I posted an update to the latest mangle of my poor Hohner tele [I've modded it so many times..





3 on/off switches and a volume [I don't know the make of the firebird pickups.. I bought them in the 90s at Subway guitars in Berkeley.. they told me they were from Sweden.. not sure I ever believed them..]

hbombgraphics wrote:NICE

are the chinese mini buckers an ebay purchase?

was no middle only option a choice or a circumstance of the switches you had available?

I could have wired the middle pickup direct to the jack socket or via its own vol pot, but it's interesting enough as it is for now.

The pickups I bought on ebay for £18 posted ($22) and sound ok - they work nicely with the P90 too, which is a bonus.

i wouldn't believe anything that madman at Subway told me LOL. one evening i was poking around in there and a couple of the employees were talking seriously about how they had PTSD from working there.

dubkitty wrote:i wouldn't believe anything that madman at Subway told me LOL. one evening i was poking around in there and a couple of the employees were talking seriously about how they had PTSD from working there.

I'd believe that I was always amaze by how many times I wanted to buy something but due to fatdog not being there you couldn't buy it because no one new what price anything was suppose to be.. even when everything had a price tag...

The 20 minutes or so I spent at Subway was easily about the worst experience I have had in a music store. The only person there was Fat Dog and my band mates. He was a totally condescending nut case.