Nearly done ... !

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.

New headstock ...

I am a little proud of the way this turned out ... waterslide decal, layer of varnish over the top .. oh, my ...

HP LaserJet 2100

Replaced my laser printer with a newer one from that auction site. Paid £15 delivered. Scary what you can buy these days for pennies. It even came with a Jetdirect network option I wasn't expecting ..

Time for a bit of guitar painting ..

My favourite guitar from the collection is a Peavey Predator .. it looks a little old, jaded and beaten up around the edges so I have decided it's time for a remodelling. It has a grounding issue as well, so time I took the faceplate off. I have a couple of slightly hotter pickups for the neck and middle as well, so hopefully this will be an improvement.

Tobacco sunburst original (meh)

So we are in the business of respraying body and front of the headstock in a nice traditional surf green, nitrocellulose paint.

I sanded down the body to mostly paint, but some of the sunburst left. It is a proper paint job, not plastic coated so once sanded it makes a good surface to paint on. The first job is to give the body a complete priming - this is three thin coats followed by one last one.

Once the primer has dried overnight, I gave it it a light wet and dry sanding with 1200 grade paper, and then began putting the colour coats on. This is after about six thin coats. It's now hanging in the garage for a week to harden nicely before I give it another wet and dry, probably with grades up to 2000 and then it will be time for about six coats of clear gloss lacquer. Then, it will be a good month of letting it harden properly before final sanding, polishing and re-fitting all of the hardware. I've a little extra thing to do; I have some waterslide decal medium for the inkjet, so I need to make up something to go onto the headstock front, which is Surf Green as well now.

I am looking forward to this a lot - it's difficult to be patient!

Active Crossovers

I thought it was time to assemble the active crossover boards. One is going to be for playing with, and will find itself into the subwoofer amp at some point in the future (have dug the Peerless 850140 out of the loft).

Here's one I prepared earlier.

Liberator, my trusty Z210 had a small failure two days ago. Wouldn't boot up - I have been switching her off during the heat wave when I haven't needed her going all the time. She'd come on for about 2-3 seconds, and then flump.

I felt like my right arm was cut off. I have not been in the new Lab in the garden very long, and things are still finding a place, but even so.

I pulled all of the USB devices, all of internal cards, re-seated the fan connectors and re-did the heat sink and fan assembly. Still broken.

So I did a search on eBay, found a company called ICT Reverse who had one in stock, and they delivered within less than 24 hours.

And today, Liberator is back up and running! I must take those Windows stickers off it, though. This machine proudly runs Linux Mint 19.

Meanwhile I have installed a new CPU board in the 16500A. (an eBay purchase from the far Americas for less than 30 quid - amazing) The new CPU board has twice the memory of the old one, so it 1) takes longer to boot and 2) the 1 gig sa/second two channel analogue board and the 100MHz logic analyser can run at the same time. Result!

I know this is nowhere close to WightFibre, Andy, but ...

I think I have fixed the network ...