BIG project - guitar body & Neck repair

[SidewinderINC]

Hi all,

Over this summer, when hopefully i'll have a bit of cash and some spare time, i plan on restoring my first guitar "red"... well i couldnt call it green could i



now i bought it second hand, so the majority of the knocks and the huge gouge that you'll see in a bit were already in it. but quite a lot of them are new caused by me when i was a beginner and didnt take too much care of it.

i know how to clean up the neck/fretboard from reading the guide on ibanezrules which is very detailed as the neck on the guitar is fine.

the rest i have no idea on how to repair it really, so here goes, i'll start with the biggest damage;



now as you can see, this is a serious gouge in the beveling on the edge. i have no idea how to remedy this problem so any ideas / links would be awesome!



the same as the huge gouge in a way, but as its much smaller it shouldnt be too hard to remedy, maybe with a simple filler? but i have no idea how to get a good finish on top of that...

thats it for huge chunks out really, there is 1 more serious bit of damage, shown below.



this is the volume control, at some point before i got the guitar the knob must have been bashed pretty hard as it has cracked the coating all the way through. the only way of fixing this that i can see is rubbing down the coat completely and putting a new coat on, but i have no idea how to do that!



this is chips/cracks in the edging on the bottom curve of the guitar. completely recoating the guitar would seem to fix quite a few of the problems.. but i dunno.

and the least taxing of the problems is this last one..



general scratches in the clearcoat, the ones around this toggle switch are the worst, but there are more all over the body, and small chips in the coat.


well, thats my old guitar. i want it to look pretty good after the summer as it WILL be the 2nd guitar in my arsenal again as i love the playability of it almost as much as my £1200 ibanez!

any help you can give to any of my problems would be awesome! and if you have links to guides that would be great too.

if there is anything to buy, it needs to be available to the UK as thats where i am. so stewmac is ok, as that ships to the uk, not sure about anywhere else.

Thanks

Matt

[ryanb]

The first question is what kind of finish do you want to end up with? There are lots of fillers and such you can use, but they are not good solutions for transparent finishes. If you want to do a solid-color finish, you have lots of options ... and that is also the easiest both for the repair work and the finishing work.

There aren't any simple or quick answers to what you are asking. You need to start doing lots of reading on the subject. Here are some links to get you started:
www.projectguitar.com
www.reranch.com
www.mimf.com
There are lots of other sites out there, as well as many good books and videos on the subject. Do LOTS of research before you start and always practice on scrap first. Good luck with your project and have fun.

[SidewinderINC]

ideally i'd love to keep the same colour/finish as it is now, which as you can see is a cherry red grained finish.

i thought it might be the case that i wouldnt be able to fill those gouges and retain the finish, so lets say i ignore those, or make them smoother and so that they "fit" with the guitar.

[Earthrug]

If the guitar sounds cool the way it is, I would do as little as possible to it. Changing/ adding finish to a guitar could change the tone. If it were me, I would touch up the big gashes and buff out as many of the scratches as possible. Throw some fretboard conditioner on it/ set up and buy some killer pickups for it of you dont have any already.

[SidewinderINC]

ive got the killer pickups for it

Dimarzio D Sonic - Bridge
Dimarzio Breed - Neck

i'll probably be able to get most of the dings out with ~600 grit paper and then work back up the grades to get it polished again..
the one thing i'm worried about with this method is what happens if i go through the clear at any point, i'll have to just take the whole thing down to wood.

ive got a thread over at project guitar, and ive been advised to strip it down to wood and route out the bad parts and fit new pieces of mahogany in where the big chips are.
looking at the method for doing this, it seems its not a complex job, as i know somebody that will be able to route out those 2 gouges very accurately and then attempt to grain match the replacement parts.

we'll see how it goes