Black. White… Well it ain’t even orange exactly I was just trying to be clever. What the hell am I talking about? The disastercaster of course!

Today was the day I decided to rebuild from painting/staining adventure that ended in some 127 hours type shit. Yes I lost an arm, no I didn’t but I did completely goof the finish on the tele. Using a stain on the top and sides was a bad call, really bad, using it first and leaving it unsealed before applying a white paint to the top of the guitar was an even worserer mistake. Uhuh.

The stain left to it’s own devices was never going to set dry and I kinda knew this from the get go as I have used it to stain guitar necks in the past, with this in mind, applying a white top to a guitar body without binding was, well yeah pretty daft. Every time I applied paint it drew the stain into it from the sides and would then continue to push through every subsequent layer of paint, it was always visible and that was just not an option for me. This morning I sanded back all the paint and as much of the stain as I could and set about refilling the grain, like a chump. The idea was to start from as close to scratch as possible, keeping in mind some of the stain had worked itself really deeply into the timber so there was some left. I figured after using the grain filler almost as a super light skin coat it would be apples. APPLES

No.

I sprayed a top coat of white after masking off the sides and within about 30 seconds there was stain making it’s way through the white, I almost cried. I gave it a coat or two more, I can’t remember exactly because at this point I was prepared to start drinking my way into a stupor. It kept coming back so I thought it was time for a break. 3 whisky’s A cup of tea later I decided this was just not working for me, for starters I was already aware I was trying to do something you should really only attempt with a top bound guitar body, instead of pushing shit further up a hill I thought it was time to change my plan.

I still want it have some natural(ish) wood showing on the back or sides but white is a no go. I thought about black and thought I was bored with that simply as a thought, I do like black guitars but for my first foray into doing something a little bit more adventurous I didn’t want black. It was only as I was standing in the hardware store slightly getting nervous about the closing time that I just up and decided to go with some sort of red. Again red, seems a little pedestrian but it’s not a standard red it’s frighteningly bright and I think THINK I will be able to make it work with natural back and sides, so. Here we go.