Ok, I know this is a bass forum, but I thought I’d share my Telecaster refinish project with y’all. I consider myself a bassist, but I do occasionally play g*****. Besides, this being my first refinish attempt, I didn't want to screw up any of my basses! This Tele was my birthday present to myself in 2004. I had ordered one in Lake Placid Blue, but it was taking forever so I decided to just pick one from what the store had in stock. This was the one that played the best, but I wasn’t crazy about the color (sorry Midnight Wine fans). The color was just too close to Texas A&M maroon. My friends all liked to tease me about my Aggie-caster. So I planned one day to refinish it in UT burnt orange, transforming it into a Bevo-caster. I finally worked up the courage to do it this Christmas.
The hardest part was gaining an understanding the various options for paint and clear-coat. I was trying to replicate a specific color so that pretty much limited me to auto-body paint, because they can mix just about any color you want. I didn’t want to wait three months for acrylic lacquer to cure, so I went with a two-part poly clear coat. I had the color mixed and loaded into aerosol cans by a local auto paint supply store and I ordered some Aero Max clear coat off the web.
When I started this project I had no idea how much it was going to cost. The clear coat alone was $80 for two cans, plus the paint, a respirator, sand paper, a 6” random-orbit buffer, masking tape, duct-tape, drop cloths, polishing compounds, and lots of other miscellaneous stuff. Altogether I spent over $250! Because of the cost, the amount of work, and the hazardous paint I’ll probably never do this again, but I’m glad I did this one. Now I have a one-of-a-kind, personalized Tele.
Here’s the Aggie-Caster as it looked originally:
First I stripped off all the hardware and scuff sanded the poly finish:
Here it is after a few coats of paint:
In these next two photos you can see I had some pretty bad orange-peel after I finished the clear coat:
Then it was on to the most difficult and nerve-wracking part: sanding the clear coat:
Here I’m working with a couple of the coarser grit papers to get rid of a sag:
After the final sanding with 1200 grit you can see that the clear coat is not 100% flat, but I was afraid of sanding through to the paint beneath:
Then it was off to the buffer and some polishing compound. You can see that it buffed up nicely, but the polishing compound left swirl marks:
After polishing again with swirl remover it looks pretty good:
I shielded the body cavities before re-assembling it:
The finished product:
Although it is far from a perfect paint job I’m pretty happy with the transformation.
Here’s one final shot of my new Bevo-caster:
I hope you enjoyed reading!
John
