DIY Strat – The Return of the Legend Part 4: Progress!

After spending a lot of time reading about the best way to strip the remaining finish off the Legend, I settled for plain old hard work. Depending who you believe, Nitromors either will, or won’t touch the polymer lacquer. Some people recommend a thick coating of the stuff, wrapping it in cling film and leaving overnight. Others state the best way is with a heat gun. Both these options seem to have obvious draw-backs: high potential for personal injury coupled with probable damage to the guitar.

So, I lumped for hand-sanding the guitar body (with a little help from the orbital sander to get the lacquer off). The whole process “only” took a few hours, and isn’t strictly finished yet, but good progress was made – including removing the horrible white gloss I’d started to repaint the guitar with 5-ish years ago.

Starting work

The final result (although I took these pics before completing the job – the remaining black paint on the cut-out is now gone!)

Some spots of the original wood sealer can still be seen in the grain, but as I’m going for a solid colour I don’t this as an issue. The next step is to spray with primer, sand, spray with primer, sand, spray with primer…

Continue to Part 5