The wood itself is gorgeous. It's quilted maple, stained with a mix of water soluble Transtint Dyes, blended up on a practice piece to see how I liked the color. Quilted maple reflects light differently with every move and that pattern is you see is only there with the light from that angle. Despite looking wavy and almost bubbly, it's flat and smooth. The wood was gifted to me by reader Raven, who offered it in reply to my late June post about putting a clear plastic side on this guitar. Couldn't have done it without your help!
All in all, the finish looks pretty good, but not as "deep" or glossy as the factory finish. The spray can instructions say to spray a light coat every two hours, and by the time I fussed over a detail that I didn't like, I got started close to 10AM. Two hours after the third coat, I lightly sanded with 500 grit, cleaned with mineral spirits and shot a fourth coat.
My experience with the finish compatibility test over the weekend says this won't reach maximum hardness until late tomorrow at the earliest, in line with the can's warnings not to use the item for 24 hours. Three days comes from the other instruction on the label saying:
Recoat within 2 hours. If unable to do so, wait a minimum of 72 hours, then lightly sand and recoat.That says I could add more finish on top of what I have on Saturday. My tentative plan is to try to buff the guitar with a mild polish. Not rubbing compound but something beyond pure wax. Tool Junkie Heaven for guitar techs offers electric buffers or foam polishing pads. The pros use something like their buffing systems:
I can't do anything to it for now, so in the meantime, it's on to other projects.
WoW....that looks gorgeous!
ReplyDeleteIndeed, Sig, it is lovely. Good work, you and Raven. What a great outcome for an instrument that otherwise would have been abandoned, or relegated to a dusty corner somewhere.
ReplyDeleteI'll be interested to hear how she sounds when it is safe to play her.
drjim nailed it. It does look gorgeous.
ReplyDeleteAt eight to ten coats Min wax starts to look deep. Some of my projects have received even fourteen coats.
ReplyDeleteLooks great now !
That's a number I can work with. I'm finding over spray crept in under some of the masking news paper, and it's going to take buffing with something or other.
DeleteDo you find any reason to say their warning to wait three days to recoat is overly cautious?
It will take a week to finish coating it, and it probably better sit at least another week before I take a buffer to it. I want it fully hardened.
Lookin' Good!
ReplyDeleteI do not know if it is God's math at work or some other mysterious force,
but I am always struck by the fact that patterns repeat across substances- the pattern in that maple can be found in ripples in waves, beach sand, cloud formations, abalone shells and rock formations. Very curious.
I do not know if it is God's math at work or some other mysterious force,
Deletebut I am always struck by the fact that patterns repeat across substances- the pattern in that maple can be found in ripples in waves, beach sand, cloud formations, abalone shells and rock formations. You'll also find the same patterns can repeat in the same thing if you look at a different scale. Zoom in on a rock, say, and the features seen at the microscopic scale can look like the ones seen at a larger scale.
There's no way to answer that without including faith of some kind. I think "God's math at work" is as good an explanation as anything. Saying "it's just partial differential equations" is the same level of statement in my book. PDEs are simply an elegant way of describing things; they say nothing about why and precious little about mechanisms.
To quote myself from 2012:
Someone once asked J.B.S. Haldane, a famous British geneticist/biologist, what a lifetime of studying biology had taught him about the preferences of God, should there be one. He answered, "He has an inordinate fondness for beetles". I would say "inordinate fondness for partial differential equations"
Look at Earth from altitude. Nearly everything that's man made is described by lines and Euclidean geometry. Nearly everything that's natural is described by partial differential equations.
Fractals, Benjamin.....fractals.
ReplyDelete