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Well welcome back firstly & my apologies for taking so long to get this last
video out.
It's just been a very very busy time for me
but they are finally done. At the back we have the Corvette Junior
which is a TV Yellow finish and that's a satin finish.
So that was just Micro-Meshed and just
and left with a dull sheen and we've done some shading to the
top, the sides and the back of the neck just to give it a bit of an aged look.
And at the front we've got the Corvette Deluxe
which is the upmarket version.
The 2 pickup P90, we've got all the binding
around the headstock and down the fretboard and around
the body. The controls are pretty much the same as a Les Paul,
the volume and tone & the pickup switching & what-not... So there's no
surprises there.
So firstly a couple things.. you'll notice the black guitar.
Originally, that started off as
a dog hair finish. So it was black with
white grainfill but I had some blushing
in the lacquer when I was spraying it and it came to a point where is was easier just to strip
it back
which is what I did. Stripped the whole guitar back & I re-sprayed it
black and I'm glad I did. I actually prefer it
more. I put the chunky pickguard on that we had made in video 4
and I thought it would look classier if we put a
matte black pickguard on there so that's what I went with.
And it does look better.. I did film some of the
finishing process along the way so we'll do sort of a flash back now
& we'll go back in time & you can check out how we got to this stage.
So we are just taping up the top of the headstock here , where the fiber board is. We want
to retain this black
strip around the side so obviously if I'm
spraying the guitar yellow, we need to make sure that this is all taped off.
So when I'm taping the fretboard, I tend to just
move about an inch at a time & I like to leave
just a little sliver of fretboard material
exposed which allows
me to get this nice and even. If I know there's
an even sliver all the way up here, I know I've done a
pretty good job of taping it up evenly.
We've got a couple of coats of white on here
but we've sprayed it very thin. You can see
all of the pores are still open & we've got decent
white coverage on there & that's just to block out the wood out so we can now spray
the color coat. Alright, so we've
got the yellow on now & I've got 3 coats on there
but its very very thin. I don't want to fill the pores
so it was a very, very
light mix of nitro. The majority was thinners
and just the coloring. So we've still got all the open pores here
& the idea is I'll put a coat of clear
over this & then we can pore-fill
with a darker color and we wipe that back
& then we're ready to clear over the top.
I'm just going to take some of this Timbermate filler & I'm just
going to add a little bit of water to it, just get it to a
watery consistency. That's about the consistency we are after
It's like a paste.
So we've got the body sprayed TV Yellow now &
first off we sprayed it white, and then I put a couple of coats of yello. Very thin coats.
Its not actually Yellow, its a white lacquer
with a bit of brown, a bit of red, and bit of amber &
so it's not actually yellow, it's sort of a
almost a mustardy color. So the grain is all still open.
This is one of the few finishes where you don't grain fill first. It's
quite unusual so we've got the color sprayed. Now we're about to put the colored filler
into all of the pores.
You can see we are starting to fill the grain a little bit with the filler but
it certainly needs another round of grain filling though.
I've just got a damp cloth here now & I'm just
brushing across the grain, just trying to
clean off the excess that's actually sitting on top
of the wood and not sitting in the
in the pores.
We've let this dry for most of the afternoon & we can now peel off the tape that we've got covering the fretboard.
It's decal application time &
I get my decals from Rothko & Frost in the UK.
They're by far the best decal suppliers I've come across.
The decals are really thin. They're very easy to apply but
because they're very thin, they're very easy to break as well so
it's well worthwhile to order a couple of spares just in case.
So they come on an oversized piece of paper that we need to
trim it close to the
the writing. It doesn't really matter what shape you
cut around it at all, not for this anyway. These will
totally dissolve meaning the edges
will not be visible once its
set in the lacquer so you're not going to see the shape anyway.
So that's gonna be set about there..
We've got a little bit of lacquer already on the headstock.
Its not been sanded or anything. There's probably
2 or 3 coats of lacquer on there so there's not a great deal of build-up but you do need
some lacquer on there for the decal to stick to.
Now we are going to use the micro set solution as well.
It's just kind of gummy & what you do
is you just wet the area with the solution
where your about to apply the decal &
it sticks the decal down better. You can tend to get some little air
gaps, little bubbles & stuff like that & I find that
it reduce that sort of thing. It actually adheres the
decal better to the lacquer. I'll just apply some solution with my
finger. I've got a bowl
of warm water so the decal just goes into there
and it takes 15 to
20 seconds for that to come lose.
That's ready. You have to be very careful here.
We move this into the right location.
Just try and get it straight
and even.
And a paper towel
will help you smooth it out.
That looks pretty good.
So we'll let this dry for 2 or 3 hours before
we put any lacquer over the top.
Alright, well we've been laying down lacquer for the past
5 or 6 days & we've given it a week to cure.
There's been a couple of sand backs in between just to level the surface out
but we are pretty flat now. We're
at the stage now were I think we would be pretty safe to
to wet-sand that.
It's nice & smooth, it has sprayed on really well.
Initially the first couple of coats, you can see the grain telegraphing through
the finish but its a matter of putting some more coats on
and you sand it back and continue
to load up the lacquer & eventually
everything will level out. I also sprayed a
couple of tint coats & I sprayed it around this section here, around the lower
end of the neck & also up at the headstock. It just gives it that
little bit of a vintage vibe. We keep this nice and light
here, it just looks like this neck has had a lot of play on it.
its nice and worn here, & we've retained the darker color
both ends. Its time to wet-sand
this guitar and we've got 1500 grit
Micro-Mesh & I wish I could say its exciting to watch but
it's not... There's not much to it.
All you want to do is take all the orange peel off and
you just want to get an even matte
finish right across the
lacquer. Now I'm thinking that I
may only buff this by hand.
I'm not sure that I want a nice
shiny finish on it. Something
with a matte look or maybe a satin look
is probably more in keeping with the
vibe we are going for on this guitar.
I mean even if the
lacquer was to sink back a bit after we buff this out
I don't think I'd mind that. It would give it a bit of an aged look.
So you can actually feel it catching on the
high spots when you initially start. It takes
a little bit of sanding until you've taken those
high spots down, but once you have you'll find the
sandpaper will just glide across.
So this is looking pretty good now.
I've got it all nice and flat & I've just removed
the last of the little shiny spots that were still left
so that's looking pretty flat. There's no
shiny spots that I can see so I'm happy with that.
That's flattened out with 1500. So we just have to go around the
rest of the guitar
the same way as we did on the back, and there's a lot of
area to cover so it's gonna take a little while.
You can see the area that I've wet-sanded.
Its looking pretty good. In fact, I've just
noticed there's a little spot there I'm going to need to fix up.
Ahh , there's another one there.
Ok, you gotta keep looking. It's
something you come back to after you've finished and just double check
but certainly most of this are here is wet-sanded. It's all the
same uniform sheen and over here you've
got the orange peel, the rougher finish that hasn't been
sanded yet. So I'll do a section like that
and I'll probably do this section and just sort of
work my way around the top of the body. And for these curves, the easiest thing
is just a sanding sponge , a bit of dowel
and just sandpaper.
So we've got a firm
backing with the dowel
but you've got a little bit of give with the foam pad
that's in there and you can just get into the
curves a lot easier.
With 3200, we'd be pretty hard pushed to
get a sand through on the corners on this grit & we can relax
a little bit now and just clean up all these corners.
So we've got the guitar buffed to
3600 now & I'm going to leave it like that. It's got a
nice sheen to it but it's not shiny.
It's just what I'm after.
So we've got all the gunk that's got in under the edges of the
tape here. So this is lacquer thinners and
of course you need to be really careful because this will dissolve
the lacquer. Just drip it down the sides and
your done. So I'll just get a little bit on my fingertip
and just run it down the edge
like so. It gives me a nice
melted blended edge on the side there
and it will also clean up any lacquer
that may be on the top of the fretboard.
And some frets won't even need scraping. Just the lacquer will do sometimes if there's
really any build-up on the edges but I can't stress enough how important
it is that you be careful on these edges,
especially when you've got lacquer thinner on a rag.
if you slip down the side, you'll know about it. It will leave a mark
and you'll have to buff it out. You have to be very careful , you just want to
get enough on the rag
to just cover the area you need to do. You don't want it dripping off.
This is just not fitting & the reason for it is we've got just a little
bit of build-up of lacquer around the sides .there
There we go.
OK so we've got the same process
to do for this guitar and I'm going to use a white filler.
So this guitar has just had a couple of coats of black straight over the bare wood
and then its just had a very thin sealer coat of nitro sprayed over that
so the pores are still really open.
So I'm just scraping a reveal at the top of the binding
and of course the black lacquer
is sprayed onto the edges so I'm just scraping a reveal here
and the bit of black paint that we've got just on the side here
we'll just remove that in a moment. We'll get a nice sharp line
and a white reveal for the binding
on the front of the guitar.
I'm just using a Stanley knife now to just go around and really
delicately scrape the
lacquer that's left over. You need to take your time
doing this and do a good job.
So a quick look at this tool - Its just a Stanley blade with a bit of tape on it
and a bit of dowel. I've just cut a slot down
the middle of the dowel. There's a screw through there so I can adjust the
tension and that is just threaded through
by the amount of the reveal you want to scrape. Very simple to make,
would take ten minutes.
So on the black guitar,
its a matter of scraping out some of the gunk out that's
built up by the sides of the frets.
The thinners by itself is not capable of removing all of this.
You need to give it a bit of a scrape first.
Gives us an opportunity to clean up the
binding as well.
And we use the thinners like we have on the other guitar.
So the first thing we do is we mark it off. We need to see the top of the
fret there so it's marked in black. And we've got a crowning file
that looks like that. It's a 3 sided file and
there's safety edges on all sides so
we don't dig into the fretboard. We're not cutting grooves into the fretboard.
Basically what we are going to do, we're just going to file
the sides like this. What I want to do
is just remove the flat spot on the top.
We just want to carve an angle on the side here and
we carve an angle on the side there and we just leave
a strip down the middle that's untouched.
Just got some sand paper on a stick
and I'm using it just to
dress the areas that we just filed.
Just smooth them out a bit and when we buff it up
we won't have any scratches.
We do one side and we do the other.
So all the frets are done
and we've just got a sanding sponge and just
some old micro mesh
1800 grit and we're just going to
So I'm just bouncing this over the frets
and its going to round the profile on the top for me.
So I'll give you
a sound demo. Now, I'm not the best guitarist in the world which
will become very apparent very soon but
I can play some chords and just give you an idea what the
different pickup configurations sound like. We'll so some clean sounds first so we are on the
bridge pickup
the middle position
which is noise cancelling
And the neck pickup by itself
OK, so we'll do some overdrive sounds now
So I've got the volume on 3
about 5 now
up to seven
And all the way up at 10
have filmed a sound demo of the black guitar.
I didn't do the yellow guitar because
they sound the same. The bridge pickup on both these guitars,
I could not tell apart. They were that close to one another.
The only thing I would do differently is
I did coil tap the yellow guitar, the
pickup. I tapped into the coil at 7000 winds
and then I added another 2500 winds on
so when I activate the coil tap, there wasn't as much of a difference in sound as I
had hoped for.
There was a tonal change, it became middier
but I was expecting more so I may re-wind that
pick up and just just tap into the coil a little earlier next time
and see if that has any effect.
Both of these guitars are prototypes for a couple of models I want
to start selling so the back one
was the first one I finished . I'll keep that,
that can go into my collection but the one at the front,
the Corvette Deluxe is actually for sale. It was built on spec
If someone is interested in buying it, drop me an email
and we can work something out . Both of these guitars
the pickups, the P90's are directly screwed
the wood, into the body. There is no foam cushioning
What I've done to get them to the right height is I
created some wooden shims so the pickups have been
shimmed and then there is a screw going directly through the pickups,
directly into the body. I just prefer the sound of a pickup that's
mounted that way. They always sound better to my ears
when they're screwed directly into the wood. Sound wise, I think
these guitars cover a lot of ground.
Anything from Punk to rock to blues, they are pretty versatile.
The P90's are a really under-appreciated pickup I think.
They are a single coil so they are a noisier pickup.
They're a BIG single coil pickup basically.
And they sort of bridge the gap between a humbucker
and a Strat Style single
coil pickup, sort of the middle ground there.
A lot middier and a lot meatier.
There's nothing else sounds like a P90. So we've got a reverse wind on
one of the pickups
so the middle position is noise cancelling on the
Corvette Deluxe.
Well we are finally got there. We've built 2 guitars. It's taken me a while
but I'm glad its finished to be honest. It
was a lot of work with the other stuff that I am doing at the moment.
I am glad that they're finally done and they have come out really nice.
I'm really pleased with both of them. They are 2 models that I want to start selling
so if anybody has any intetest in ordering one
just drop me an email. They can be customized whatever way you want
whatever finish you want, binding, no binding. Any pickup configuration
and wiring configuration you can think of
so there's a lot of flexibility with the design.
Anyway, I just want to thank you guys for
sticking by and being patient while I knocked these videos out.
So I'll have a rest for a while and get stuck into some
of my other work that has to be done and before you know it, we'll be back with another build.
So I'll see you next time, thanks for watching.