/brandon

The guitar has finished drying and I’ve reassembled all the hardware. Below are some pictures after the buffing, reassembly, and application of the 5150 space tape. I’ve also included a little before and after look at the guitar.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

The clear coat has been applied now. Over a couple of days I put on about 15 coats. The clear has helped to even out the tape lines a good bit. This is especially true with the white lines. The black ones are still noticeably a little heavier, but not enough to really cause a problem.

Overall I am pleased with the neck. I did experience a little more line bleeding with the black paint on the neck, but I can live with it. The back of the neck turned out well too.

The Kramer logo looks pretty good under the clear. The guitar originally had a plate that covered up the truss rod adjustment. If I were to put this back in place now it would cover up just a tiny portion of the Kramer logo. It looks okay without it and I will probably end up just leaving it off. I can’t really get a true replica 5150 since I’m doing this on a 2007 Kramer Striker, but that wasn’t really my goal from the beginning anyway. Considering how bad the test run on the Fender went this project has been much more stress free.

The guitar is hanging now and continuing to dry. Just to be safe I’ll probably give it a couple of weeks to dry before any wet sanding or buffing I do on it.

With all the painting done only a few steps remain. Today I have applied the Kramer logo to the head stock. This is going under the clear coat.

Here is a picture of the logo once it was in place…

The final color for the project is black. Only a few black stripes are needed so I decided to paint it last. My other option would have been to paint the entire guitar black first, then white, and finally red. I was worried about having to spray too many coats of white to actually cover up the black and decided instead to do it last.

The technique I used was to lay down a strip of 3/4 inch tape where I wanted the black stripe to be. Then I put tape around the area and pulled up the 3/4 inch strip of tape. This gave me a clear area to spray  to achieve the desired size black strip.

Here is the neck before painting…

And after…

The body before…

And after…

Here are the finished stripes after the tape was removed…

Next up is to apply the Kramer logo and start the clear coating process.

With the taping out of the way it is time to apply the fiesta red. First here is the head stock.

Next is the body. All of these pictures are after 3-4 coats.

I allowed the final coat to dry for about 20 minutes before I started to remove the tape. I wanted to make sure the tape came off cleanly so my goal was to get it all off before the paint had very much time to start curing.

Mid removal…

Completely removed…

Overall I am very happy with the stripes. The next step is black. I’ll let the red dry for a few days and then start on the final color before the clear coat.

The white coat seemed very dry today so I’ve started the striping process. In the pictures below you can see the head stock along with the body with the tape applied.

The largest stripes are 3/4 inch. The stripe around the outside of the guitar is 1/2 inch. The next smallest is 1/4 inch and the smallest is 1/8th inch. I used 3M painter’s tape for all the different sizes.

I’m feeling pretty good at this point because the pictures make it almost look like I know what I’m doing.

Here are some pictures of the white coat after it was finished. Everything is going pretty well so far and the white is looking great. This color by itself looks really good. I can’t wait to see it with the red and black.

At this point I have applied about 3-4 coats of white over the primer. I plan to let this dry for a couple of days before attempting to stripe it with the tape. Overall the paint is drying quickly and as I mentioned before I haven’t seen a paint run yet. That alone is a huge improvement over the other types of paint from the test run. I’m still leaning toward not wet sanding between colors and just waiting until the end to smooth everything out. I’m not sure if that will turn out to be the best decision or not, but at this point there isn’t a whole lot of texture to it. Next time I should have it striped and ready for the fiesta red.

Paint…This seems like it would be an easy thing to figure out. How hard could it be? When looking back at the test run, paint really was where most of the problems originated. I mentioned before that a RustOleum primer was used on the test guitar. That was the same brand of paint we used as well. RustOleum lacquer can be found at any Home Depot and seemed like a good choice at the time. What actually ended up being true about it was that it seemed to dry really slowly and once it did finally dry it wasn’t a very hard coat. Slow drying caused problems with the tape sinking into the guitar when we outlined the flames as well as issues much later when we actually reinstalled the hardware.

The clear coat didn’t end up much better off. The RustOleum clear went on about as poorly as the paint and also had problems drying quickly and hard. After days of not being happy with the way it turned out we eventually sanded the clear off and sprayed it with a Duplicolor clear coat thinking that the auto paint would do a better job of drying fast and hard. Although being much better, the Duplicolor clear still had some of the same issues as before.

So this time I’ve decided to go with a different solution. Most research tends to show that lacquer is the way to go. Only it looks like a nitrocellulose lacquer is really what would work best. The web site I ended up ordering my nitro supplies from was Guitar Reranch. The site has a lot of good info on how to go about painting a guitar and I plan on using it often during this process.

The paint got shipped to me very quickly and it came in the mail yesterday. I sprayed a quick coat last night that I will post pictures of soon, but already I can tell a huge difference in the paint. The coverage is excellent, the initial flash time on the paint seemed to be about 15 - 20 minutes, and I ended up with zero paint runs which was a common problem before. Granted the nitrocellulose is probably very toxic and was killing me slowly as I was painting, but everything worked really well for the initial coat. I’m planning on investing in something to help keep me from sucking down all the fumes before I get too much further into this.

The real test for the paint will be how hard it dries. I’ll get an introduction to that very soon once I start applying tape to it for the stripes. I’ll probably spray 3 or 4 more coats and then give it a few days to dry before attempting the stripes. I should have pictures of the white coat up soon.

I’ve finally gotten up the nerve to attempt this 5150 paint job on the Kramer. I’ll be posting updated pictures and info on how the process has gone over the next few weeks. I hope to take what I learned from the experience of painting the Squire and apply that to this project for a less bumpy ride along the way.  Here is the before picture of the Kramer Striker. Take a close look because whatever the outcome is it will never look like this again.

First I removed all the hardware and electronics…

Next came the sanding. In this step I pretty much just used the heaviest sand paper I had access to so that I could take off the existing clear coat. I got down to the wood in a few place as you can see, but I’m planning on the primer taking care of that.

Above you can see where I’ve attached a piece of wood where the neck would go so that I can hang the guitar for painting. Below you can see the guitar hanging in my garage waiting for primer.

After one primer coat…

After 2 or 3 more coats…

The primer I used was RustOleum Auto Primer. I debated on this one for a while since I have no clue what base the primer uses. The can doesn’t list any specifics like lacquer,enamel,etc. But this is the same stuff used in the test run and I don’t think the problems associated with it had anything to do with this stage of the project.

That is it for day one. I’m sure this is going to end up being a long process. I just hope it goes more smoothly than last time. Over the coming days I’ll get into more detail about the paint and techniques I’m using and keep posting new pictures along the way.

So Josh and I just completed the guitar painting test run. The results are pretty good. Over the past few months we’ve been sanding,painting,resanding and repainting my old Fender Squire trying to treat it as a test run for the 5150 project. I didn’t want to mess up the new Kramer if it wasn’t going to work. The finish looks good as you can see in the pictures below. I do think it is better than the finish that was on the Squire to begin with. The next step is to decide if I’m brave enough to continue on the Kramer. Until then, check out the flames…