Ha, I'm sure your stick welds look nicer than these joints when I welded them. I filed these joints and then used sandpaper on them, right after welding they look terrible.
This is sort of how it's gonna be, Wandres were finished a lot of times with candle soot that was used to paint sort of a soot wisp burst on them which looks super cool. I've been trying to figure out how to make a candle really sooty, I made a candle with parafin and a really long wick and it makes it pretty sooty but maybe not quite enough, also just using this blue as a base for a metallic olive powder I got. The controls will go in the pedal enclosure, I need to cut an angle in that so it sinks into the body more and the jack will go in the end sticking out.
This is the Wandre I'm trying to make, to me it looks like a mashup between a Les Paul and Mustang.
Someone actually sells legit repros of those cool trapezoid pickups but they are insanely expensive, they are actually kind of like Fender XII pickups inside there. I need to buy an arbor press and some nickel silver sheet to try and make some covers like that, I think some Jazzmaster pickups in there would be awesome.
Just gonna use a Mastery for the bridge, used a NOS Hagstrom Tremar for the vibrato. I've never seen an actual wandre bridge and tremolos up close, they look extremely complicated in pictures (the saddles in the bridge actually suspend the strings above the pickups, instead of how strings typically rest on them).