The days have flown by, and I haven't gotten around to updating the story of this Spector project.
Over about a week, I messed around with trying to use paint to cover up the repair area. Not much time spent total, just a few minutes of sanding and spraying here and there. I ended up doing it over four times.
The first three times, I tried spraying the repair area with nitro lacquer, lightly tinting it with white and amber pigment. The idea was to cover the crack with a color that matched the surrounding bare maple. Then coat the whole area with lacquer tinted transparent orange-amber, to match the finished maple of the rest of the neck and headstock. Well, for reasons I don't completely understand, the band covering the crack kept turning too dark orange, like this:
I don't know why, but it kept doing that. It could be that I wasn't allowing the opaque lacquer band to dry long enough, and the pigment was being drawn up into the outer coat. Sand it off, try again, and again. The fourth time, I put in only a tiny trace of orange with the white, and sprayed the band an off-white:
For some reason, that worked better. When I sprayed the amber over top, it came out more even amber. Here's a look at it on Alex's bench, as he's working on installing the hardware.
I'm not completely happy with it; the band is a little light colored now. But it's pretty good for a cover-up job.
Next up, Alex is making up a new black plastic control cavity cover, then a new brass nut. And it will be ready to be strung up!
Note Alex's new workbench, in his own shop space, right down the hall from mine. He's getting set up. The workbench came from Rob Allen, who is reorganizing his shop (farther down the hall) and didn't need it. Alex knows that he needs to get that bench covered with a whole lot more tools, projects, and material scraps. A big clean workbench just....doesn't seem right.
Alex is sharing that space with Raul Reulas, another of our Secret Underground Lab Luthiers. Raul was in the R & D department at Schecter for many years. Now he's got a (better paying) day job, and only does guitar work as a part time sideline business. Raul is an expert on CNC work, and has a nice small CNC router rig in there, across from Alex's bench. Raul is looking at getting more into doing CNC custom inlay work. With Alex right there sharing the shop space, it's likely that Raul will teach him some of that and get him to help.
