How to Refinish A Guitar | I Like To Make Stuff

Hey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff. Today we're going to make this old guitar look like this. I bought this guitar when I was in high school or early college and it was in really bad shape when I got it. I refinished it with what I had available at the time and that obviously has not held up. Eventually I sold this to a friend and he did some stuff to it and then he recently gave it back to me so I thought it'd be a great time to completely strip it down and redo it. So here's some of the reasons that I want to fix this up. When I was in high school I cut out the pick guard and added a new pickup but the wiring is totally shot on this. It buzzes like crazy so that needs to be fixed. The clear coat that I put on has yellowed. This is supposed to be white and my friend had a band sign the outside of the guitar. So I want to replace all that, replace all the electronics and maybe make a new custom pick guard. In case you're curious this is a Fender Music Master. This is the student version of the Mustang from the early 70s so let's take it apart. I'm going to go ahead and take the neck off. It has a little bit of wear on the top of it but overall it's in good enough shape that I'm not going to really do anything to it. I'm really just going to focus on the body and the electronics. While we were taking it apart I was just curious. I looked up the serial number and you can actually find the year that a guitar was made by looking up that number. We found a little chart online that gives you all of the ways to break down that to get a certain year. So I found out that this one's actually made in 1978. We've got everything pulled off the body now and so I'm going to just strip it down. I'm going to use chemicals first because I don't really want to sand any more than I have to. Eventually I will have to sand out some of these marks but we're going to start by using some paint stripper just to clean it off as much as possible. Let me make a little disclaimer before I start doing anything. I'm going to finish this so that it will last a really long time but I'm not doing a professional finish. If you want a super professional finish there's a whole other level of detail that you're have to put into this process but I've done this process before and those guitars still look great. Also this guitar was a student version and it's been refinished at least three times so it's not exactly a piece of art. If we can scrape off some of this initial clear coat the stripper will probably work even better on the paint below it. It'll probably work faster. I'm using this paint scraper but you've got to be really careful when you're using a metal tool. Usually these bodies on the cheaper guitars are pretty soft wood so you can easily dent or you know put a gash in the front of the guitar so just be really careful keep it at a low angle and try to scrape right across. You just really want to loosen the top surface and let the chemicals do the real work of removing Obviously you could sand it to an even higher grit if you really wanted to but this is really smooth to the touch. It's even and I think it's going to be just fine for finishing. The next step is to get it ready for paint and remove all of the dust from the surface. I'm going to go over it with a tack cloth and wipe down every single piece of it and if you wanted to you could also use some naphtha to get rid of the oils from your fingers from the surface as well. And then to get it ready for color we're going to use this. This is a sanding sealer and if you're into guitars you may recognize nitrocellulose. This is a finish type that's been used on guitars for a really really long time and the first step is to seal the grain of the wood and that's what we're going to use this for. It's pretty cold in here right now and it's a good idea to have this stuff kind of warm so I'm just going to soak it in some warm water for a few minutes before I try to spray it. And while that's heating up let me point this out as well. I put some painter's tape on the inside of where the neck sits because you don't want to put any kind of a finish there. As you add layers of finish to this it's going to build up the surface just a little bit and in that case it would actually lift the neck away from where it needs to be relative to the body. So you want to make sure that you mask that entire area off. Sanding sealer is basically a clear lacquer and the purpose of it is to make a uniform surface for all the future coats to go on top of. So you want to spray all this pretty heavily and then lightly sand it then do another coat and another coat and another coat until you get a uniform smooth surface over the entire piece. Luckily spray lacquer dries really quickly as well so you don't actually have to wait very long in between coats. This is a place where it's totally worth doing more coats than you think you need. It will help you later on in the project. You can kind of see right in here that the grain is starting to raise and there's also a little bits of dust that I didn't get off like right there. The good thing about the sanding sealer is that you can still continue to sand this down and just do another coat until your surface is perfectly smooth. This is after two coats with no sanding in between and it's starting to actually look really nice already but when you run your hand over it you can definitely feel where the grain has raised up in certain areas. Right in here is pretty smooth but around the outsides is pretty rough. So I'm going to use some 220 really light sanding just to get everything knocked down take off the dust again and re-spray. So I'm done with all the sanding sealer. I put on two thick coats and then sanded the entire surface flat and then did two more pretty thick coats. After those I did have a couple of small drips but luckily you can just sand those flat and you're good to go. Now I'm going to have to dust it off and then I'm ready to put on the burst. One thing you might notice here that's different than a lot of other guitars when you put a burst a sunburst around the outside of a guitar usually they pick a body that has the same color wood all the way across. This one's got a dark section down here and a dark section on the back because I think this is poplar. So this is going to end up looking a little different than a typical burst but I think it's going to be really cool. When you spray on a burst there's often two or three color versions and in this case I'm going to use two colors. I'm going to use cherry red around the outside ring to give it a really red tint and then an amber to go over the rest of it to fade that red into the color of the body. These are both the same kind of lacquer as the sanding sealer but they have color in them. So we're going to spray these on exactly the same way. Again before you spray on that other lacquer with the color just make sure to get rid of all the dust and any oils on the outside of the surface. The first layer we're going to spray just goes around the outside and just barely comes over onto the front and the back face. So we're going to make some templates to cover the front faces. So it gives us one now we've got to make a copy of that for the back side of the guitar. Now we've got the guitar blank sandwiched between these two pieces of cardboard but they're not super tight and that's because we're going to be spraying down this direction and we want a little bit to bleed under and then after that we'll flip it over and spray it the other direction. So we'll have a really hard line of color around the outside and a little bit of fade. Now if you wanted that fade to go around the edge a little bit more you could cut these pieces down to fit on the inside of the profile just a little bit more. I've got a lazy susan here so that I can lay this on spray down and spin this around to be able to spray all the way around it and then I'll be able to flip it over and do the other side just to make sure I'm getting full coverage all the way around on the top and the bottom. And another thing to think about here this is really red and it does go on translucent you can always add more but it's harder to take it away so go really slowly really light passes. This may be kind of hard for the camera to see but the color is really heavy right here in the middle but once it just barely hits the curve up there the color almost completely disappears which means the angle that I've been spraying at is good for this outside edge but it's not really getting around at all. So I'm going to do another pass but lower my angle a little bit that way I'm spraying a little bit more in this direction and not so much in this direction. Now it's a lot more of an even red all the way around there and it's starting to creep up around the corner. We won't know what it really looks like until we get the cardboard taken off but I think it's going to be a good base. We'll end up blending this color with the top surface with the next color of spray. Now that's only going to take about 30 minutes to dry before we can move on to the other colors so in the meantime let's talk about the pick guard and the electronics. If what you have already works you can drop it right back in place you'd be good to go but you could also replace the pickups you could replace the pick guard because most every guitar has replacement pick guards available but I'm going to replace all of it so I'm going to start from scratch and make a new custom pick guard instead of buy one. I got some replacement pick guard material you can buy this in sheets and so I'm just laying the old in place I'm going to trace the outline of it and where all the screw holes are and before I remove it I'm also going to trace where the old pickup was the original one because I want to use that same location and the screw holes that go with it because these are already in the body. I want to use the same holes down here for this pickup that I added when I was in college. I don't want this size but I do want these holes to be in the same place so I'm going to trace those as well just so I've got them as reference and then maybe just put a little line there on the inside and then that shows me where the outside edges of that pickup should be. I'm using pick guard material for this and so it's going to eventually end up being basically the same as if you were to just buy a replacement and put in a custom hole but the point here is that you could actually use an entirely different material for the pick guard get a sheet of aluminum get a sheet of clear acrylic whatever you want trace out the profile of your existing one and cut it out you can actually have multiple pick guards that you swap out pretty easily this is a place to really customize your guitar if you want to. To cut this out I'm going to use a scroll saw and I'm going to go outside the line just a little bit because I'm going to add a chamfer to the outside edge after I'm done with the router. I wanted to trace out the new pickups so that I could cut the holes to fit perfectly and I realized that the one that was up here on the neck is actually a different size this is smaller than what was originally there so I need to trace its new outline and then this one actually has a three hole pattern instead of a two hole pattern so I'm going to have to completely change where this one goes. Luckily I can line it up with the outside marks and then trace the outside and then go down through these screw holes and scribe a place to drill a hole. This pick guard is made out of an acrylic and sometimes when you drill into acrylic the bit slips around a little bit before it grabs and causes a not so pretty hole so in this case I'm going to use something called a brad point bit this was actually recommended to me by somebody in the comments on a previous video and these things are fantastic they've got a tiny little brad point right in the center of the bit and that starts the hole and keeps the bit from wandering around. I got all those holes drilled and the brad point bits worked great I would totally use those if you're going to do something like this. You'll notice that I put a couple of holes right here inside the areas where the pickups are going to go so that I can put the scroll saw blade in there and cut out those pockets. I didn't order a specialized bit to put the chamfer on the pick guard because I already had chamfering bits and I figured they would work well it turns out that the gap in between the bearing and the actual cutting edge is bigger than this material so I'm not going to have any luck using those bits and rather than waiting on another bit to show up I did some tests to see if I could make that chamfer with a file. Putting the chamfer on here with the file and then going back and sanding it smooth worked really well it's just going to take a little bit of doing to get around all the curves of the pick guard. I did some tests trying to get that bevel right with the file and it would work but it's not ideal but then I did a little research and found that what I should have done is started with the template for this. I think I can still make it work though. So what I should have done is started by creating a template on half inch or even bigger MDF some sort of material so that I had a wood template to route with. I'm going to go ahead and make that now and then just stick it to the bottom of this new pick guard. So obviously this should have been done first and if you cut a template you can cut outside the line and then smooth it on a sander to get a really perfect shape then cut your pick guard and then also use the template for routing. I want this to hold on here but I don't want it to hold on forever so I'm going to use some spray adhesive on the wood surface to stick them together. The pick guard's all done and we're going to take this off and see what this looks like. The red turned out pretty nice and you can see it kind of feathered over which is what I wanted and so now we're going to take off the other guard and start to add the second color to feather this into this. So if anything this is the stage where finesse kind of comes into play. You've got these two colors that run into each other really quickly and you want to try to spread that out mix between the two with a different color. So you're going to go really lightly at a distance but just try to focus on the transition point and once you get the transition good if you want to feed it more onto the face and onto the back you can do that. In the past I've only done a three color burst and you do the outer ring then the inner surface and then a blending layer but with this two color system it's a little bit different. It turns out that this second color doesn't actually fade enough of them together so I'm going to end up having to go back and forth between the red and the amber to get a nicer fade in between these. I'll just take a few more layers. I've gone back and forth on the color a little bit and I wasn't super happy with my first version of this and I found that it was because it was hanging from a single point. As I went to spray the color around I was trying to chase the curve but the spray was actually making it spin. So after doing that a couple of times I ended up laying it back down on the Lazy Susan so that it would stay in place and I could follow the curve with the red. I ended up getting much better results doing that and so now I've got the color done on both sides and it's time to put on the clear. For the clear I got the same lacquer but it doesn't have any coloring in it it's just clear. This is going to be the top coat and I've got two cans of this which means I'm going to be spraying a whole lot of it. So to cover this we're going to follow the same process as before a really thin coat and a light sanding and then a thin coat. Again this stuff dries very quickly so you just got to stay on it but you can get a whole lot of coats done in a single day. But before I spray any of this on I got to go back over this with a tack cloth to get the surface completely dust free. While the lacquer is drying on the guitar it's time to start putting on the electronics and basically I'm just replacing everything that was already there. I bought some new pieces but it's essentially the same and they come with instructions as to how to solder it all together. I got a new set of pickups for a Telecaster and I got a wiring kit for a Telecaster as well and it comes with a diagram that shows you where to solder everything up. So I've just got to solder all this together and put it in the pick guard. And if you're a guitar player you know that the bottom pickup on a Telecaster is usually angled and the top one is flat. I'm doing mine opposite. I don't know if that'll affect anything I'm sure it probably will but it'll sound fine. So this is the switch that came with the kit. It selects between the pickups or mixes them but unfortunately it's a little bit too tall for the body of this particular guitar. I used this one before for the same purpose so I'm just going to reuse it. So here it is the body's got a whole bunch of lacquer on it. I've been putting coats on every 30 minutes or so all day long. That's one of those things you could just continue to do and continue to do you're just going to build up more and more finish but I'm ready to assemble the thing. So I set all of the new electronics that are all fully working and ready to go into place but it didn't quite go in and that's because these pickups are actually a little bit deeper than the ones that I had on here originally. So I'm going to have to drill out some small areas in here so that the pickups can completely sit in. On the bottom of these pickups there's some screws that stick out and I think these are actually the problem. So I took this chalk marker and drew on top of them and then set it in place. So once I pushed that down it left a little chalk mark inside the body and then I just circled those with the sharpie so I know exactly where they are that way I can drill out a small area and not have to route out the entire area and risk ruining the finish out here. I did drill those holes but it turns out that they weren't deep enough and I'm not exactly sure if I just need to make those holes deeper or the entire cavity. So just to be safe I'm going to go ahead and route out the entire area where the pickup goes. To protect the front surface I've covered it with painter's tape and now I'm just going to cut away with a knife the area where the pickup is going to drop in. Then we'll be able to take a small palm router and set it on there's always different components with different widths and depths and they're just going to fit differently in a body. There's a really good chance that you're going to have to chisel or route out the area underneath the pick guard to allow for what you're adding. It's really not a big deal to do and generally it's hidden so you can get away with just kind of cutting out more than you need. I've got this thing fit into place now it's time to put the whole thing back together. And the last thing to go on is the bridge but this one has quite a bit of corrosion on these pieces and so tonight before I put it on I'm going to try to soak this in some white vinegar and see if I can get some of that off. Now in the past I had one of these that had a lot of damage to it and I found a local motorcycle shop that re-chromed it for like 15 bucks. So if you have a piece like finished Music Master. I am pretty happy with how it turned out but there was a lot of work to get it here. I ended up having to sand down and go back and re-spray a few times to get the blend that I wanted between those two colors. In fact I wanted to show you the Mustang that I did a long time ago because it was a three color burst and I actually like how it came out better. It's the exact same process but I wanted to show it to you in comparison so you could see what a two and a three color burst looked like. Of course I'm not a professional guitar refinisher so I stopped at a point that I was happy with but if you really wanted this to look like it came out of the factory you're going to spend a lot of time sanding and adding multiple coats of the top coat to get it really nice and glossy. But like I mentioned before I actually prefer the satin finish on this type of guitar. I'd love to know what you think about this one so let me know down in the comments and if you haven't seen we've got a whole bunch of other types of project videos for you to check out they'll be right over there and if you're not subscribed go ahead and do that as well. That's it for this one guys thanks for watching see you next time. Today we're going to make this guitar look like this. Coats of satin lacquer that's the word. I'm going to end up cleaning up the line and adding a bevel with a router bit and a little bit a lot of bit router bit and a little bit.