by Kacey Y » Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:45 am
If you're interested in getting into DIY refinishing because you want to achieve a specific result with an instrument, I would strong suggest doing some projects to practice FIRST. I've had some experience with rattle can and HVLP spray gun style painting through old jobs (as an occasional thing, not the main job) and decided to do the finish on a bass body I made myself. I did A LOT of research beforehand too, even to the point of emailing with someone professional who had a lot of experience with the specific product and tools I was using. Everything went pretty well, until I did the clear coat and had a weird interaction problem I hadn't read about and didn't expect. It took a lot of elbow grease for me just to undo my mistake and strip the body down to the wood again, because I was using polyurethane and it cures like hard plastic. I even did a test piece beforehand, but I didn't do the clear coat on that, just the color coat (and I didn't prime it the same way, which was my mistake with the main project), I still had a catastrophic mistake that took a long time to fix. Eventually I traded in a favor with a pro builder to finish it for me and he did a nice job.
Anyway, that's a long winded way of saying don't pick a project you care about to learn a new skill. Just practice on some scrap material or a beater instrument or something broken you don't care about first. Buy a cheap guitar off CL for $50 or less, go to a flea market and find a half broken instrument for $20 or something and practice on that. There's tons of information, how to videos and all of that online, you can just type in "guitar refinish DIY" or something into Google and fall down a hole with that, but with almost any new skill you're going to screw up the first project you do, at least.
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