The final stages of painting a guitar are fun .. real fun. Having waited impatiently for a few weeks to let the final lacquer coats go hard enough to finish properly, I followed the guides on Manchester Guitar Tech's web site to do the necessary. It involved starting with an all over sanding with 1200 grit sandpaper, using a small block for the flat areas and by hand on the more curvy areas wet and dry. I took great care not to go too far on the radiuses. This left the body with scratches all over. I then went over with 1500 grit wet and dry again, which kind of removes all of the scratches and leaves it with a dull surface, with some faint scratching still visible.
Then I went over again with 2000 grit - again wet and dry, which magically changed the surface to a semi-reflective, burnished kind of finish. You can afford to get a bit more robust as the sandpaper is taking much less material away. There were a few areas where I had to go back to 1200, 1500 and back to 2000 to make it uniformly burnished all over.
The final step involved applying T-Cut and polishing, and the effect was almost magical. I've now put all of the re-polished (Dremel style) hardware on, and this is how it looks now - before re-stringing.
