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Thursday, 28 November 2013

Les Paul Florentine: Bring the Bling & Second Trace Dye

Well, I changed my mind again. My gold hardware arrived today from Guitar Fetish and it looks awesome. Seeing it on the guitar with the original trace dye, it seemed obvious to me that more colour was required for this build. As you can see, there's a 335 style Trapeze Tailpiece, a gold Tune-O-matic bridge and a pair of GFS Dream 180 humbuckers with gold pickup surrounds.



And so it was back to the idea of wine red. I mean how awesome will those gold doodads look on a field of dark red! Over 2 hours I slowly sanded off the original trace dye with 240 grit, paying close attention to those pesky glue spots. 2 whole pieces of sand paper, and a little bit of my sanity later, the job was done and I couldn't wait to get a second trace dye on there to see if my sanding was complete. Here's the result..


All the glue spots are gone (hooray!) and the wine red looks great. This is a darker shade created from 80% cherry red and 20% blue Colortone dyes from Stewmac. Next step is to sand down through the grades again - 360, 400 and 600 to get the surface ready for clear coats and to take a bit of the colour back off the top. The colour will be replaced with a slightly lighter shade (95% cherry, 5% blue). Hopefully this will let the figure pop as much as possible. I can't wait to see the red with the gold!

I still need to decide on a colour for the bottom part of the guitar. I was thinking to just leave it natural with a slight tint from the Tru-Oil that is to come. Hmm.. still not undecided. I may hit it with a slight Amber dye, or a mix of Amber and Red Mahogany or even Medium Brown. I might need to do a couple of experiements to see what they look like though..

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