Primer

I can finally put some paint on! I'm going to put all the colour coats on the bodies first, then do all the clear lacquering of the necks and bodies at the same time. The colour coats will be the most fiddly, as they're not only different colours (black, silver and now white for the strat) but also require different coloured primers (black and silver want grey primer, white wants white) meaning that there'll be lots of equipment cleaning to do :( 

First off, I masked off the binding on the hollow telecaster to keep it safe from the paint.

The tape is put a hair's width on the 'binding side' of the line between the plastic binding and the wood. This will make sure that there is definitely paint all the way up to the binding with no wood visible between the two: 



The tape is put on, then trimmed. I like my neck pockets to remain unpainted, so they're also masked off:



Then they're hung in the workshop, and hit with a first coat of grey primer:



This is cellulose primer, sold by Rothko and Frost. The guitars will get five or six coats of this today at 30-45 minute intervals. 

I had a bit of a disaster at this point. I dislodged the solid body guitar from it's hanging, it fell and put a significant dent into the wood. I had to sand it back and fill the dent using epoxy. I'll come back to prime it once I've flattened and resanded that area.

The hollow body, however, was fine, and ended up with five coats of primer. I think that should be enough:



And once the masking has been removed:



There's visible orange peel in the finish. I'll probably flatten it a bit once it's cured for a couple of days.

It's impossible to mask the binding on the front and rear faces of the guitar. That just gets painted, and the paint is then scraped off. I used a craft knife blade to do this: 



Using my thumb to hold the blade in place, I scraped around the guitar. This came out surprisingly well - there's one area where I scraped slightly too much off (less than 0.5mm), and wood is visible, but I don't think that will be important as the colour coat will cover up the mistake.

I've read that it's better to scrape the paint from the bindings as you go, once the paint is touch dry. If it's left too long, the paint will harden, making it more likely to chip as you scrap. Having said that, I've just seen a youtube video of Gibson's method, which appears to be to leave it until the very end... 

Here's the whole guitar as it currently stands, I actually quite like the colour :] :

 

This guitar will cure for a couple of weeks, I'll get the other one and the strat primed in the meantime.