My first attempt at a guitar respray

(There’s a lot of scratting)

The guitar I play most (and have always) is probably the least expensive guitar I own. It’s a Korean Westone Specrum 2 bought in about 1987 for £180.

Over the years I’ve bought another 2 of them hoping to at least have a spare. But neither of the two replacements measure up. After much messing around I realise it might be something as ridiculous as the colour.

The original is “hot pink”, which is to say it’s PIIIIIINNNNNKKKK!. Which in the 80’s was just the only viable colour for a superstrat. Every other colour might as well be beige.

The hex colour code for hot pink is FF-69-B4.
If you move those numbers around you can get Rizla Suzuki blue (69-B4-FF) which is usually called ‘Malibu’. I’ve always liked the colour, so I decided to go for that. Also some guy on EBay was selling a litre of it dirt cheap, and why not have two guitars in a neat colour palette.

Just for interest here’s a table of what you get when you move the hex numbers around. I think you’ll agree that this is the only viable colour palette for 80’s superstrats :

HexName
FF69B4Hot Pink
FFB469Koromiko
69FFB4Aquamarine
B4FF69Green Yellow
B469FFHeliotrope
69B4FFMalibu
A yellow that’s nearly right
FFFF69Laser Lemon

Before I continue a little disclaimer.

Do not under any circumstances take anything I say as true or useful, or even as advice. I am not a professional, I’m not a Luthier, I don’t really know what I’m doing. What I’ve done is probably what you’re doing right now. I searched the internet for tips on how to go about spraying a guitar.

I would say this… Don’t do this on any guitar you aren’t afraid to throw away. Don’t do it on any guitar that’s worth more than a hundred quid. Probably just don’t do it. Pay a professional.

So.. moving on..

Stripping the original paint

I think there are three basic methods of stripping paint. Abrasives, Chemicals and heat.

After a lot of research I decided to go with heat and it was a wise decision. Using a good heat gun you can strip a guitar down to the wood in less than an hour. There are some things to watch out for.

  1. Be careful not to gouge the wood with your ‘scratter’.
  2. Be careful not to burn the wood.
  3. Be careful not to set yourself, or anything else on fire
  4. Don’t breathe in the fumes if the guitar was made prior to 1980, it’ll probably contain lead.

This scratter is pretty much perfect
luthiers exquisite paint scratter of fire (level 5)
Starting the job. Makita hot air gun
Makita 4TW

You can’t really tell but this video shows me stripping the guitar all the way down to wood.

here we can see the previous paint was actually a silver metallic base cote with a translucent red lacquer
how to do shiny
this is what the front looks like before sanding
front pre sand
this is what the back looks like before sanding
front pre sand

We can see here that I managed to singe the wood with the hot air gun. This could have been avoided with a bit more patience but it looks far worse than it is. If you intend to leave the guitar at wood finish though, you’ll need to be very careful not to do this!

a bit of light sanding and it comes off
burn comes off
when you start sanding (probably start with 80 grit, very lightly) put a piece of paper under the guitar to collect the dust.. we’ll use this later for making putty.
collect the dust!
the putty is just a mixture of sawdust and wood glue
wood putty
when we’ve got rid of every last trace of the paint, but before we do a finer grit finish, we fill any dings and unwanted holes with the putty. Make the putty runny enough to allow air bubbles out of the holes. You will likely have to wait for this to dry then make a second batch of putty to fill any bits that have sunk because of bubbles.
fill holes with wood putty
The body wood actually has a decent grain nice grain
but they’ve still applied a vaneer for some reason, even though the guitar was paint finished.
nice grain

Here I confess to having got busy and not properly documenting my progress because it got very difficult.

Here’s what I learned :

  1. Cellulose paint takes FAR LONGER to dry than is reasonable. I mean literally months.
  2. Sanding even by hand takes off FAR MORE paint than is reasonable
  3. Putty is insufficient for filling very large dings and holes, you’ll need to use solid plugs of wood.
  4. Clear lacquer of any type will discolour if sprayed on too thickly.
  5. To get anywhere near a factory finish you’re going to need to spray, wait, and sand many times. The whole process could take a year.